Page 89 of The Ghostwriter

I wish I could have…

And during the day, I worked on revising the book. Frantic hours—sometimes with my father. Later, as his conditioned worsened, alone.

But not alone. Not anymore.

A month after I turned the book in to Monarch, it became clear that taking care of my father at home had become too much for Alma to manage. I visited him at his care facility in Ventura, driving up from Topanga or from Ojai, where I was responsible for cleaning out the house.Boxing up a lifetime that was both tragic and extraordinary. My father was a complicated man with many facets, but together they created someone I wished I’d had more time with. Especially just as I was beginning to understand him better.

“Thank you for having me on the show.” My voice sounds odd to me, smoother than I imagine it sounds on a regular day, and I’m appreciative of the quality of the production team. We’d recorded it several weeks after the book was released and I was still in a state of grief, having lost my father in late April. And yet I’d also been energized by my comeback.All Her Beautiful Dayshad released on the fiftieth anniversary of Poppy’s and Danny’s deaths, and just as Nicole had predicted, it has been at the top of theNew York Timesnonfiction list ever since. I’ve paid off Calder and my attorneys, and Nicole has been busy fielding requests for my next project.

I walk up the front steps of my father’s house for the last time and unlock the door, stepping through the threshold and into a mostly empty space, with only about fifteen boxes of my father’s things left to take. My footsteps echo on the terra-cotta tiles, swept clean and mopped by the cleaning crew I’d hired. Jack is coming later this morning to take these last boxes to the storage unit I’ve rented. But that’s not why I’m here.

“What was life like, growing up with the famous Vincent Taylor?” Jessica asks. “What kind of baggage did that create for you—not just as a young girl, but also as an adult?”

“It wasn’t easy.” I listen to my voice tell the story, of how my mother left and what it was like to navigate a world where everyone believed my father to be a murderer. How I’d spent the rest of my childhood abroad, only returning to the United States once I was sure I could live as someone else. “Loving my father was a complicated algorithm. It meant accepting there were things about him I’d never understand. It meant not asking questions I didn’t want to know the answers to. It meant accepting possibilities too horrific to contemplate. For a long time, I wasn’t able to do that, so I chose not to.”

“And yet, you returned to Ojai to help him write his last book,” she says.

“It wasn’t my first choice of a job, but my options were limited at the time.” I hear myself give a small laugh and remember where I was when we recorded this, a dark studio in Hollywood, a producer sitting across from me, separated by a wall of glass. “It was definitely complicated,” I admit to Jessica. “At first, he seemed normal. But it soon became clear his mind and memory were failing. He’d get confused and start thinking I was my mother. The more confused he became, the more he revealed. Facets of his life with Poppy and Danny that didn’t add up. That required further digging.”

After we’d decided on the story we’d tell the public, after we’d finished the book and it was just the two of us, trying to piece the rest of the puzzle together, I’d asked my father, “Do you really think Mr. Stewart killed Poppy?”

“I don’t know,” he’d said.

“What about Mr. Stewart’s cat? Poppy’s movies show you burying him, not Danny.”

“Danny killed the cat and wrapped it up in one of my T-shirts. He left it next to the shed where my mother would have found it and blamed me.” He rubbed his eyes and said, “I hate that Poppy died believing I was the one who killed Ricky Ricardo.”

“Could Danny have killed Poppy after all?” I asked him. A question we returned to again and again. Turning it over in our hands like an artifact we were trying to decipher.

And every time, he’d tell me he wanted to believe that he had, because that would justify how things turned out. It allowed him to live with himself, however flawed that life turned out to be.

The last time I asked him that question was in November, and at that point, my father had been in the care facility for several months. It was clear he was deteriorating fast. He became argumentative and angry.Accusing me, his care team—even the other patients—of outrageous behavior. It was painful to watch, but I kept showing up, because every now and then he’d be lucid, and we’d return again to the events of that day. To the things we still didn’t know. “The truth belongs to Danny and Poppy,” he’d told me once. “And it lives in the past, where we can no longer reach it.”

A few days before my father died, he turned to me, out of the blue, and said, “I should have never sent you away. It was a mistake.”

We were sitting in front of the care facility enjoying the first blue sky of April, me on a stone bench, him in a wheelchair next to me. His speech was slower. More labored, which he hated. “It’s fine,” I said.

He shook his head, a sharp, jerking motion. “No. It was selfish. I was a coward.”

“It would have been worse if I’d stayed,” I said. “And you were right. It opened a lot of doors for me.”

“It was never about that,” he said. “I lied.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me, his expression tired and sagging. “Every day, you were becoming more and more like Poppy. The way you looked. The way you moved. Your laugh. Your…” He paused, searching for the word he needed, and I waited for him to find it. “Beliefs,” he said, looking relieved. “I couldn’t bear to watch you age past her. You were a daily reminder of who she never got to become.”

I placed my hand over his and squeezed. “You did the best you could. No regrets. No looking back, remember?”

He gave a gruff laugh, more of a cough than anything else, and we sat there in a patch of sun, remembering.

That had been the last conversation we’d had.

Jessica’s voice pulls me back to the interview. “What was it like to finally learn the truth of what happened? Of the events surrounding that terrible day in 1975?”

“It was shattering,” I say. “There’s a weight to that kind of knowledge that bears down on you, becoming a part of you.”

“I doubt there’s anyone on earth who hasn’t read the vast coverage of what you learned in your research. Tell us about the moment you realized your father was truly innocent. That Danny and Poppy were victims of a predator who lived next door. Who still lived next door until just a few weeks ago.”

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