Page 64 of The Ghostwriter

I press Play, and Poppy’s room appears. She’s sitting on the bed, her camera pointed toward the open doorway. After a few seconds, she stands and moves over to the door, where she sits on the floor, a straight shot down the hall. Like she’s waiting for something.

Danny suddenly lurches out of his room, my teenage father tackling him, their bodies slamming into the wall. He kicks at Danny, spit flying from his mouth, his face turning red. It’s obvious my father is the aggressor; every time Danny pulls away, my father attacks from another angle.

After about a minute, their mother enters from the left side of the frame, presumably coming from the kitchen. Black trousers and black flats, you can only see the bottom half of her. She brushes past Poppy’s camera, and the first time I watched this, I assumed she was going to intervene. But she steps around her battling sons and into the bedroom at the other end of the hallway, closing the door. Danny and my father are now rolling on the floor, each trying to get the upper hand.

Then their father appears. Still wearing his work clothes, though his tie is gone and his shirt collar unbuttoned. He grabs my father and pulls him back. Danny sits up, rubbing his shoulder where my father must have landed a punch, breathing heavily. My father’s gaze hits Poppy’s camera head on and sits there for just a few seconds. And in those seconds, you can see such a deep sadness, as if whatever the fight had been about had broken him.

I stop the video. “What were you thinking about in that moment?”

It takes my father a few seconds to return to me. “Where did you get this?” I can tell from his tone he didn’t expect me to find her movies. That the game has veered out of his control.

“I found them beneath the floorboards of Poppy’s closet,” I tell him. “I had them transferred to digital.”

“How many did you find?”

“Ten,” I tell him.

“Only ten?”

“Why?” I ask. “Were there more?”

His gaze snaps back to mine and he shrugs, saying, “I wouldn’t know. Poppy was everywhere with that damn camera. When she wasn’t behind it, she was begging people for odd jobs so she could buy more film or pay to process the rolls she’d already shot.” I watch the way he shifts in his chair. The way he tries—and fails—to pluck imaginary lint from his pants. The way his gaze jumps from the computer screen to the window to the door, and then back again.

I tap the screen. “This moment. That look on your face.”

My father shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”

“What was the fight about?” I ask, glancing down at my phone to make sure my voice app is still recording.

“I don’t even know when this was filmed… How should I know?” His tone is combative.

I glance at the closed door, suddenly worried Alma might interrupt us and put an end to our session. And I can’t afford to step away now, not when I’m so close.

When people get defensive, I know I’ve hit something they’d rather not talk about. But those are the places that will yield the most. Not necessarily as a narrative point, but the feelings and emotions behind why people do—or don’t do—something helps me understand their mind better. Helps me get their voice right on the page. I want to know what the fight was about because that might also reveal why he doesn’t want to tell me.

“According to the label on the reel, it was filmed at the end of May,” I say. “What troubles me is that this is the fight you told me about the other day, but what you described isn’t what’s on the clip.” I soften my voice, hoping I don’t scare him off. “It wasn’t Danny who attacked you, but the other way around.”

My father stares at the screen, his younger self frozen in time, crouched on the floor and looking straight into the camera. His father’s hand is gripping Danny’s shoulder, and neither of them is fully in the frame. I press Play again, and my father launches off the floor and catapults toward Poppy, placing his hand over the lens. That’s the end of the clip and the screen goes dark. I close the lid of my laptop to keep him focused on me. “What didn’t you want her to see, or hear?”

Again, he says, “I don’t know.”

“Dad,” I say, feeling impatience taking over. How many ways can he still evade and lie to me? The murderous expression on his face in the clip, the graffiti on the wall of Poppy’s closet that he claims was a game, none of it makes any sense without knowing the significance of this moment. The one Poppy said changed everything. “This was just a couple weeks before they were killed. Surely you can remember.”

He’s shaking his head, a tiny motion, as if trying to rid himself of a memory. Then he looks at me, a facsimile of the expression I saw on the screen. Pain. Regret. “Danny couldn’t stand to see me happy. Whatever I had, he either wanted it for himself or he destroyed it.” He looks out the window of his office. “It might not surprise you to learn that your mother wasn’t interested in me at first. She had a crush on Danny, like everyone else. But she and I were friends. She used to tutor me in math, and we’d often do our homework together at my house. One day, we were at the dining room table studying. I looked up and she was smiling at me like she knew a secret. Then she leaned forward and kissed me.”

I can imagine the two of them, the kids I’ve spent countless hours studying, sitting at the now familiar table where my grandmother would play solitaire and drink tea or coffee from a mug. And I imagine my mother’s smile, lighting her up from inside, and what that kiss must have meant to my father. The boy no one liked. Who couldn’t fit in anywhere.

“Your mother was my first girlfriend, but she’d dated other people before me. Danny liked to toss these little bombs into my life. Pieces ofinformation he knew would upset me, then stand back and watch me explode.” My father’s voice is quiet, as if he’s reaching back in time, trying to get it just right. “He was the one who told me that your mother had been pregnant. That she’d had an abortion.”

He can’t look at me, as if he doesn’t want to see the judgment on my face. The pain he must still feel is evident in his body language—slumped in his chair, defeated.

But the information sinks in—Poppy’s suspicion, Margot’s doubt—confirmed as fact. “Was the baby yours?” I ask. Even though I think I already know the answer.

He shakes his head.

“Whose was it?” I ask, my voice gentle. Encouraging. But I feel a tickle of unease, because this was a question Poppy had been following, and I wonder where it led her.

“I should know, but I don’t. Perhaps at one point I did?” he asks, as if I might hold the answer. “But I don’t know if she never told me, or if I’ve just forgotten. But it wasn’t mine.”

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