Page 35 of The Ghostwriter

“So she just threw all her movies away,” I say. “Four months’ worth of them.”

“That’s my theory.”

I think again of his night terror, of the hiding place he was searching for. His fear that the knife he’d hidden had somehow gone missing.

“Did anyone check the hiding place inside her window?”

He looks shocked. “How do you know about that?”

“You told me.”

He shakes his head as if to clear away shadows. “That was a pretty small space. Reels of film wouldn’t fit in there.”

We return our attention to the documentary. Father penguins caring for their babies while the mothers went off to find food. What an upside-down world we humans live in. I sit with the idea of Poppy throwing all her movies away, but it doesn’t fit. She was so meticulous about recording in her diary which film clips were important. She was clearly trying to tell a story.

So many threads are tangled in my mind—my mother’s abortion. Danny’s temper. Poppy’s last diary entry, her fear palpable on the page. I can’t figure out how it all fits together. And yet…if Poppy was protecting a secret, perhaps she did get rid of her reels? I imagine them decomposing in a garbage dump somewhere. Buried and useless after fifty years of being exposed to the elements.

Just then Alma comes down the stairs, wearing a sweater and rummaging around in her purse. “Oh good, Olivia,” she says, standing between us and the television. “My sister just called and needs me to take her and my nephew to the emergency room.”

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“He fell and broke his arm,” she says. “I’ll need you to feed your father and make sure he has his meds.”

She gestures for me to follow and together we make our way into the kitchen, leaving my father alone on the couch with the penguins.

She’s got everything lined up on the counter—a plate of lasagna covered in plastic wrap, an empty glass, his bottled protein drink next to it, and a multicompartmented pill dispenser with times and days of the week on the various lids. “Put the lasagna into the microwave for two minutes, covered,” she tells me. “He likes his protein drink in a glass, no straw. He needs to take these three pillsbeforehe eats, and these other twoafterhis meal, but make sure he finishes his protein drink first. I shouldn’t be more than an hour. My brother-in-law can pick them up if it’s going to be longer.”

Together we walk back into the living room. “Vincent, Olivia is going to get your dinner ready and give you your evening meds. I’ll be back long before it’s time to go upstairs for bed. Make sure you eat your food, or your stomach will get upset.”

My father stares at her as if he can’t believe his life has come to this. “If I finish my vegetables and promise to do my homework later, can Olivia and I do a craft after dinner?”

I stifle a laugh, but Alma ignores him. “I’ll be back soon,” she says.

I heat his dinner according to Alma’s strict instructions, give my father the first three pills, and sit across from him, watching him eat, the slow motion of his fork as it travels from plate to mouth to plate again. The regular sips of his protein drink. I’ve got the last two pills ready to go as soon as he’s done.

He sets his fork on his plate and wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Do you remember the treasure hunt I did for you with the book?”

There had been a lot of hunts over the years, but unlike with the poor hamster, most of the time I’d find something fun on the other end. The jean jacket I’d been begging for. Once I found a new bike leaning against the fig tree in the back corner of the property. Other times they were smaller things—barrettes. Music boxes. A glitter wand.

I shake my head and point to his plate. “Alma will kill me if you don’t finish that. And I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That book you were obsessed with. I think you read it at least ten times.” He searches his memory for a title but grows frustrated. “The one with the kids and the game. I left you clues in it.”

A memory clicks into place. Of me, in the fifth grade, sitting alone on a bench, my book resting open on my knees, and looking across the yard to the field where Jack played soccer with some of the other boys in our class. Two girls passing by me, arms linked, neither of them giving me a glance as they headed toward the bathroom where a group of them liked to congregate to try on lip gloss and gossip about clothes—Benettonsweaters. LA Gear sneakers. Guess jeans. Adjusting scrunchies in their hair or piling them on their wrists. Another reason I usually asked permission to use the restroom during class.

Sometimes my teacher would let me read in the classroom during lunch recess, but that day she’d had a meeting, so I was stuck on the bench in the shade, my otherness poking at me. I opened my book—The Egypt Game—and started to read.

I was just sinking back into the story, the playground around me fading away when I turned the page and noticed a note penciled into the margin right next to the page number, in my father’s handwriting.The date of your birthday holds the first clue.I stared at the words, my mind turning over the idea of another treasure hunt. It had been a while since the last one; he’d been so busy with his new book and with the move from our apartment and into the giant house on the east side of town, a Spanish compound with a wall surrounding it, cutting us off from the world.

I flipped back toward the beginning of the book and found page 8, where the wordmeetwas circled, and another clue written in the margin.The last two digits of our phone number.

I found page 29, the wordincircled. In the margin:my birthday.

The yard became a background noise to my hunt, deciphering his message, paging forward and backward in the book until I had the whole message memorized.

Meet in front of school at three.

“It wasThe Egypt Game,” I tell him now. “I was eleven.”

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