Page 13 of The Ghostwriter
“What should we talk about today?” my father asks when we sit down later that morning for our session. He looks energized, ready to work. “I’m working on that scene with Danny and the cat,” I tell him. “I spoke with the team at Monarch early this morning and they’re very excited for more chapters like that.”
My father nods. “One time Danny locked Poppy in the garage. Threatened to beat me up if I let her out. It used to make me so angry, how everyone—even your mother—used to think he was so fantastic.”
There’s a thread of bitterness in his voice, the remnants of a younger brother trying—and failing—to measure up. But I’m wary of letting this memoir turn into one of petty grievances and sibling rivalries. I want to get to the core of my family. Figure out who each of them really was—separate from one another, but also because of each other.
“Typically, I ask to speak to your closest friends and then mine them for information about you and about that time. Then you and I dig into the same topics, and I craft a narrative around the memories that everyone shares. Weaving the consistencies into a book, revisiting the inconsistencies until we can all agree on what likely happened. But obviously, I’m not allowed to do any of that.” If my father catches the resentment in my voice, he ignores it. “Instead, I’ll need to rely on what you remember and hope I can suss out what’s true and what’s part of your disease.”
“I understand your frustration,” he says. “But this is why it’s so important to get this book done now, when I can still remember the more important moments.” He leans forward, animated. “I’m going to give you the same advice I give all young authors I mentor. You can’t protect your characters. ”
I look up. “This is your memoir, Dad, and you’re not mentoring me,” I remind him. “I’m also not a fiction writer.”
“Of course you’re a fiction writer. You always have been.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember?” he asks. “The stories you used to write? They were quite good for someone your age.”
“I never wrote any stories. Is this one of your delusions?”
He brushes my words away, annoyed. Then he stands and leaves the room. I wait, wondering if I should follow him.
He returns holding a large box with a fitted lid. The kind you’d put a large toy in and wrap with a giant red bow. He lifts the top and rummages around inside until he finds what he’s looking for, pulling out a sheaf of papers clipped together with a butterfly clip and handing them to me. On them, I can see the scrawl of cursive across the wide-lined pages.
He gestures toward the packet. “My favorite story in there is the one where Lionel Foolhardy goes to summer camp. I can’t believe you don’t remember writing these.”
“You were the one who invented Lionel Foolhardy, not me.”
He shakes his head. “Lionel was one hundred percent your creation.”
I flip through the pages, memories floating back. How I’d sit with my father while he worked, with my own notebook, drafting story after story. Lionel goes to summer camp. Lionel volunteers at the local animal shelter. How we’d stop at three for a drink—him his first whiskey of the day, and me a Shirley Temple with a maraschino cherry. We’d talk about plot problems and character arcs. “I’d forgotten,” I say.
But I’m unsettled. As a ghostwriter, I know better than most how easy it is to tell ourselves a story until we believe it’s true, no amount of evidence to the contrary convincing us otherwise. I spent my entire adult life believing my father created Lionel Foolhardy as a way to entertain me. And yet, a parallel universe has existed where I was his creator. I was the one who penned those stories and made Lionel a fixture of my childhood. If I can’t remember something so basic about my own life, what hope do I have to untangle the fractured pieces of my father’s memory?
“What else do you have in there?” I ask.
He hands me the box and I balance it on my knees, peering inside. At first it looks like a jumble of junk, no different from the boxes out back, but I start to recognize pieces of my childhood—the bracelet I wove for him when I was seven and went to summer camp, the brightly colored thread now faded. A small box that might have once contained jewelry rattles when I shake it. When I open it, I find all of my baby teeth inside. I see report cards from elementary school. Several drawings, and a few notes written in a clumsy childhood hand. I love you, Daddy.
“I can’t believe you kept all this stuff.”
He looks offended. “I can’t believe you think I’d throw it away.” His voice is quiet when he speaks again. “I saw you, you know.”
Confused, I look up.
“At that conference in New York,” he clarifies. “I saw you in the lobby. I looked for you later, but I was told you’d checked out early.”
“An emergency at home,” I say.
“Of course,” he says, and I can tell he knows I’m lying.
I replace the lid and set the box on the floor, imagining him taking it down every now and then, flipping through mementos that suddenly end when I turned fourteen and left for school, never to return again. How perhaps he’d planned to fill the box with more memories that had never come. His belief that I would return home. Come over for dinners and the holidays. And how painful it must have been when I didn’t.
I’d assumed the years of womanizing and drug and alcohol abuse were a coping mechanism for the trauma he’d suffered as a child. But now I see that it was perhaps a father trying to forget that he was alone in the world. Immersing himself in the easiest ways to forget.
I swallow hard, not wanting him to see my emotion. “You do have a tendency to fill a box with junk,” I say.
He looks embarrassed. “I’ve been meaning to deal with those boxes for years but…” He trails off, perhaps unwilling to admit aloud that now he’s not in any condition to be making decisions about what’s trash and what’s not. “I know you’re only here to write this book,” he continues. “And please say no if I’m overstepping. But Alma’s hands are full with all of my appointments, medications, and managing the house. Plus, there are probably some valuable things buried in there among the trash that might be worth some money—correspondence with other authors, old annotated manuscripts we might be able to auction off. Alma wouldn’t recognize their value, but you would. Maybe, if you need a break from working on the memoir, you could sort through them?” He gives me a wry smile. “No dead hamsters. I promise.”
I laugh and say, “To this day, I still hesitate before opening a box.”
“Like I said,” he continues, “feel free to say no. You don’t have any obligation other than the book. Assuming you’ve decided to stay on,” he finishes.
I think back to our initial conversation, knowing there was never a question of me accepting this job. “I don’t make it a habit to walk away from hard projects,” I tell him, leaving out how very precarious my financial situation actually is. “And looking through the boxes in the guesthouse might help, given the fact that I’m not allowed to interview anyone.” I wait to see if he’ll respond, but he just gives a curt nod and I push on. “They extended our deadline to July,” I say. “But that’s still only four months. My number one job is to make you sympathetic to the reader. They need to want to spend three-hundred-plus pages with you—either because they like you, or because you’re telling them something they want to know.”
“I think likable is off the table.”
I dip my head in silent agreement. “They have to believe the information they’re getting is new, but they also need to feel your vulnerability in the retelling.”
He nods and I check to make sure my voice recorder is on, then pick up the legal pad I brought with me, flipping around until I get to the page I want. “You have a full page here, with just one single sentence on it, over and over again. She shouldn’t have gone. She shouldn’t have gone. ” I start to hold it out to him but then remember he can’t read it anyway, so I set it on the table next to me.
“No, let me look at it,” he says.
I pass it over and he stares at the page, running his fingers lightly over the words, slowly nodding to himself. “‘She shouldn’t have gone’?” he repeats. “That’s what it says?”
“Yes.”
He looks out the window, the light illuminating his profile. “I’m a fool,” he says, almost to himself. “I thought you could come in here, we’d spend a few weeks chatting, and you could take what I’d already written and clean it up.”
“Writing a memoir is challenging, even under normal circumstances. It requires you to face painful memories that have sometimes been buried for years. It’s a commitment to telling the truth, even if it’s hard.” I point to the pad and say, “So tell me about that page. Who is it referring to?”
I expect him to tell me it’s about Poppy, hitchhiking into Ventura alone. That the fault was hers for luring a killer back to Ojai and destroying my father’s family. Or perhaps he’ll tell me that she shouldn’t have gone back to the house the night of the carnival.
But he surprises me. “I’m pretty sure it’s about your mother.”
“I’m not following.”
“There was a party. A bonfire. Everyone was going, but I was grounded. I was a bit insecure at sixteen, with my first girlfriend. I wanted her to stay back with me and, in the way of young boys everywhere, didn’t know how to simply ask for what I wanted.” He gives a quiet chuckle. “So I left it up to her, and she took me at face value. Went to the party with Danny and Poppy.”
I point to the page, filled with the same phrase over and over again, and say, “Are you sure that’s what this is about? This seems more…” I hunt for the words. “Unhinged. Ominous.”
“I can’t tell you why I wrote it over and over. But I can say with a fair amount of confidence that it was about that bonfire. About a boy who got caught ditching sixth period and was grounded for it, who wanted his girlfriend to choose hanging out with him over going to a party.”
I sigh and say, “Okay.” My panic is slowly rising. I’ve maneuvered myself into an impossible corner. I have one solid chapter about Danny, and another one I have no intention of showing anyone. I was hoping this page would lead me to another scene I could write. But instead, it’s teenage angst. I feel like I’m riding shotgun with a man who has lost control of the car and there isn’t anything I can do but wait for us to crash.