Page 5 of The Ghostwriter

I nod, unable to speak, my mind trying to catch up.

Alma continues, “Your father’s disease has progressed enough that it’s compromised his written language.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, and I don’t mean to be rude,” I say to her. “But what exactly is your role here?”

“I am your father’s caregiver. He hired me shortly after his diagnosis on the advice of his doctor. I drive him to his appointments. I make sure that he eats and takes his medications on time. I make sure that nothing upsets him.” Her lips form a tight line, telling me that my presence here is not something she welcomes. Or perhaps she’s judging me for the fact that it’s her doing those things for him and not me.

My father interrupts. “I have a completed draft of a book. I’m under contract to finish it, but I can’t.” He looks down for a second, then up again, Alma a silent sentinel next to me, giving him the space to continue. “When you find yourself in a place like this, you look back on your life. You have regrets.”

I wait to see if he’ll expand on which of his many regrets he’s referring to.

“I don’t know if this is something I can do for you,” I finally say. “I realize I signed a contract but…” I look past him through the windows to the mountains in the distance. My father has the perfect vantage point to see the pink moment Ojai is famous for, when the sunset illuminates the mountains in a magnificent shade of rose.

“I know I’ve let you down in a thousand different ways,” he says. “But I need this, and I think you do too.” When I don’t respond, he says, “Let’s just try it out. If, after a week, it isn’t working, you’re free to go.”

I think again of the money I owe John Calder. Of the $500,000 that I’ve barely made a dent in. Of my mortgage payment, which had been late again last month, and the call from my attorney’s billing department, asking for me to get current on my account, which is edging up toward $200,000. I think of my house, which I will surely lose if I don’t make this work. I take a sip of my tea, wishing desperately for that gin and tonic, and say, “Okay. A week.”

My father slaps his hands on his knees, delighted. “Excellent.” To Alma he says, “We have a few more things to discuss. Could you take Olivia’s things up to the guesthouse?”

“That won’t be necessary,” I interject. “I can get myself settled.”

“There are clean sheets and fresh towels,” Alma says. “Unfortunately I couldn’t do anything about the boxes, but hopefully they won’t get in your way.” She leaves, closing the door softly behind her.

“Any dead hamsters in them?” I joke.

When I was young, my father loved designing treasure hunts for me. He’d leave me notes on the bathroom counter, sending me running to his sock drawer for a shiny silver dollar, or taped to the milk carton, directing me to the broom closet where I’d find a package of my favorite licorice sticks. But when I was eight, I came home from school to find a box sitting in front of our apartment door. That particular hunt had involved boxes of many kinds, growing larger and larger until I’d found the final box tucked underneath the sink in the bathroom.

“That was a mistake,” my father snaps, pulling me back to the present. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“Not to people with a basic understanding of biology,” I tell him. “Everyone knows you need to punch more than two holes in the lid.”

I take another sip of tea, waiting for my father’s flare of defensiveness to die down. Finally he says, “I’m seven years sober, you know.”

“Congratulations,” I say, wondering if he’s about to make some kind of amends.

“It nearly killed me, so I quit. The irony is that now I’m dying anyway.”

I shake off the complicated swell of regret and fear that I might lose a man I’ve spent years convincing myself I didn’t need. “Tell me about the book.”

My father swivels in his chair and opens the bottom desk drawer, pulling out a stack of legal pads held together with rubber bands—twenty or thirty of them. Horrified, I realize he’s written the entire thing by hand.“There are a few things you need to know.” He hesitates, as if unsure how to continue. “First of all, it’s not a novel. It’s a memoir.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why lie about that?”

“We didn’t want anyone to know about the scope of the project in the event you passed on it.”

Of course. My father wants me to ghostwrite a memoir about his glorious career. To extol his talent, his many awards and successes. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that objectively, but I promised I would try.

“There’s certainly a lot of material to work with,” I say. “I’ll need access to all of your editors, your publicists over the years, your agent of course. And just so you know, I’m not going to gloss over your addiction or your behavior. You wouldn’t want me to. Scandal sells books, and you certainly created a lot of it.”

“You misunderstand,” he says. “The memoir isn’t about my career. It’s about my childhood. Specifically, it’s about my family and the months leading up to the murders of Danny and Poppy.”

I sit back in my chair and stare at him, the lie about the novel suddenly making sense. If word got out that my father wanted to write a tell-all about the murders, people would go berserk. My mind shifts again to who I’ll need to talk to—Danny’s and Poppy’s friends, anyone who worked on the case in 1975. People who knew my father.

My mother.

I don’t know if I’m ready to tackle this project, and yet I feel as if I’ve been waiting my entire life to write it.

“I’ll have to read what you’ve written so far,” I finally say. “But I’ll also need your permission to talk to the people who were there. Have you done any of that prep work? Let them know you’re writing a book?” I ask, my chest tightening, imagining having to approach people cold. Typically, when someone decides to write a memoir, they tell the people closest to them that I’ll be reaching out and that it’s okay to talk to me.

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