Page 37 of The Ghostwriter

My mother’s drinking.Everyone has wine at the end of the day.

But I know better. I know it’s not normal. If I can film it, people will see what I see, and they will believe me.

I sit now with my father’s old projector and a bedsheet covering a wall of boxes in the garage—one of the only dark spaces in the house. I’ve loaded my first reel and turned the lights off. The sheet isn’t smooth, warping the images as they flicker in front of me. My birthday party in early March, just a couple minutes of me spinning in a circle, catching my parents at the picnic table outside, Vince on the back steps and Danny by the fire.

I hate that there isn’t any sound, but I couldn’t afford it.

Ned, the owner of the camera shop, had seen how disappointed I was and tried to cheer me up. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “You can get more for your money if you go without sound.” He winked. “Besides, when you can’t hear the words people use to distract you, you focus on what they’re doing instead. The truth lives in people’s actions, their unguarded moments, not in the lies they tell.”

Turns out, Ned was right.

It’s easy to see the way my mother wobbles when she stands to dance with my father, her wineglass nearly empty. The wistful way Vince looks when he thinks no one is watching him. An unguarded laugh from Danny makes me realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen him so relaxed. So happy.

The party cuts away and I’m wandering through the house. Vincent and Lydia on the couch. I lean closer to the screen so I can study the way his hand strokes her arm. How she leans in to him, soaking up his attention.

Behind me, I hear someone enter the garage. I glance over my shoulder to see Vince, drinking a soda. “My first reel,” I tell him.

He comes closer. “Cool.”

Together we watch as the scene shifts again. The bonfire party at Mr. Stewart’s old house. The tall flames spiraling high into the night, sparks caught on film, bright dots of light melting into the dark. The camera zooms out to show groups of kids dancing, sitting on lawn chairs and in the dirt, the shadows of trees behind them. I can still hear the music—Grateful Dead. Eric Clapton. The Who. A kid I don’t know grabs a laughing girl around the waist and pulls her toward him.

“Turn it off,” Vince says, his voice a low warning. He moves closer to the sheet, staring at it.

“What?” I ask. “Why?”

He turns to me, his cheeks growing flushed. “I said, TURN IT OFF.” He grabs the bedsheet and yanks it down, the images vanishing against the brown boxes behind it.

I cut the projector. “It was just a party, Vince. There will be others.”

Vince drops the bedsheet on the floor, and I move to pick it up before it can get dirty. But he stops me. Shoves me toward the wall, then tries to pull the reel off the projector.

“What are you doing?” I shout, grabbing the projector before it can topple over. I get a sharp elbow into my chest as he tries to push me away. “Vince, what’s your problem?” But my gaze cuts toward the film, wondering what he’d seen that had set him off.

Our mother opens the door to the garage and says, “What’s going on in here?”

We leap apart, but I keep my hands on the projector, protecting it.

Vince pushes past me, past our mother still standing in the doorway, and disappears.

My mother stares at me a beat and then points at the sheet, still on the floor. “That better not have a speck of dirt on it.” Then she, too, disappears.

I slowly unroll the film from the projector and place it back in the canister I’d carefully labeledMarch #1, my hands shaking, my chest achingwhere Vince had elbowed me, and a thump of worry passes through me, knowing he would have destroyed this reel if my mother hadn’t interrupted. I think of the arguments he and Lydia have been having. The whispered ones they think no one can hear, and the louder ones they have when they think no one else is around. What I know about Lydia that Vince doesn’t. I think again of the images of my family, their unguarded moments caught on film to be studied later. And I wonder what else I might be able to see when I go back and really look.

Chapter 15

The following morning, I find my father drinking coffee in the courtyard, his face tilted toward the sun. “Good morning,” he says. “Did you sleep well?”

“Well enough,” I say. “You?”

He shrugs and looks at me. “Every night is an adventure these days.”

I swipe the hair off my forehead. “I was planning on going to the library this morning to look up the news coverage of the murders. If you won’t let me talk to anyone, maybe I can make sense of things using those as a framework.”

A hummingbird hovers next to the lemon tree, and we both watch it dart in and out of the branches before lifting into the air and vanishing over the garden wall. “I might have something that will help,” he says.

He enters the house, says something to Alma, and the two of them disappear up the stairs. The courtyard is quiet, not even the sound of traffic passing by, and I’m reminded of my own house in Topanga, the way the chaos of the world seems removed. A homesickness rises inside of me—forTom, for my space, my life in Los Angeles that I’m on the verge of losing. To a time before I owed John Calder close to $500,000 and my attorney another $200,000. Before my father decided he needed to share his secrets, yanking my childhood questions out of the past and into the present.

He returns carrying a folder and Alma resumes her cooking. “I’m not sure what’s in there,” he says, passing it over. “It’s been a long time since I’ve looked.” He glances toward the house. “Alma will have breakfast in about a half hour if you’re interested.”

---