Page 17 of The Ghostwriter
“I know you can’t tell me about the job, but how are you spending your time when you’re not working?” Tom asks.
My father has a standing physical therapy session every Thursday at eleven, so we’d stopped early, and I’d gone out on another research trip. I’d called Tom from the car on my way back from the cemetery where Danny, Poppy, and my grandparents are buried. Their gravestones were modest, lined up in a row:
Edmund Frederick Taylor
Beloved father and husband
January 19, 1937–November 15, 1978
Patricia Sampson Taylor
Devoted mother and wife
July 27, 1941–December 4, 1980
Patricia “Poppy” Marie Taylor
Forever in our hearts
March 3, 1961–June 13, 1975
Daniel Edmund Taylor
Gone but never forgotten
February 26, 1958–June 13, 1975
I imagined my father coming here to visit his family and wondered what it had felt like to be the only one left. And what it will feel like when that’s me.
“I’m never not working,” I tell Tom as I check the driveway for my father’s car. Making sure he and Alma are still gone before I disconnect my phone from the car and make my way around the house toward the courtyard and the guesthouse.
He sighs.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, tossing my keys onto the nightstand and settling at the desk.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Our last few conversations have been weird.”
“Weird how?” I’m running through the week since I arrived. We’ve talked every day, usually right before I fall asleep, and everything seemed fine to me.
“I don’t know,” he continues. “I know this job is hard. I know you’re struggling. But I feel like there’s something else you’re not telling me.”
I laugh. “There’s a lot I’m not telling you.”
“No,” he says. “This isn’t about the job. It’s an evasiveness. A distance.” He’s quiet for a moment before finally saying, “I don’t know. I’m probably imagining it.”
“I’m fine. We’re fine,” I tell him, hoping he can hear the certainty in my voice and not the guilt over how much I’ve been concealing.
But after we get off the phone, I’m worried too. That he’s intuited my stress and wondered if it was something other than the job troubling me. Tom once told me his radar is tuned differently than most people’s. He picks up on signals the rest of us ignore. I’ve always thought it was wonderful that he could read me so well. But now it’s become a liability, and I will need to be extra careful when we talk. To give him my full attention so that he doesn’t start asking questions that I don’t want to answer.
***
Later that evening, Alma tells me my father needs my help with something.
I head upstairs to find him sitting at his desk, staring out the window. “What is it you need?”
He turns to look at me. “I was hoping you might be willing to take a swing through my email just to make sure there isn’t anything important I’m missing.”
“Oh. Sure,” I say. He stands, letting me sit at his desk, the leather chair swiveling under my weight.
I click over to his email and ask, “Password?”
“It should already be logged in,” he tells me.
I point to the screen and say, “It’s asking me for a password.” When he hesitates, I say, “You don’t have to tell me, but I can’t look at your in-box without it.”
“Rebecca,” he says, his voice quiet. As if he’s embarrassed to say the word too loud.
I look at him. “Mom’s middle name is your password?”
“Have you ever been in love?” my father asks, and I think again of Tom. Of how in tune he is with me, and an ache passes through me.
“Why hang on to a woman who left you? It’s been decades,” I say, trying to move the subject away from my love life.
“You can’t erase the past by not thinking about it.” My father gives a hollow laugh. “Believe me, I’ve tried. Your mother was the best thing that ever happened to me. Better than any of my books or awards.”
I snort and look back at the computer screen. “She left you to raise her daughter alone.”
“My daughter too,” he reminds me, his voice quiet.
I type in my mother’s middle name and find hundreds of messages waiting for him in his in-box. “What do you want me to do in here?” I ask.
“Clean it out,” he says. “Make sure there isn’t something buried in there that I need to deal with.”
I scroll through emails from the New York Times and Washington Post. Solicitations from local politicians asking for donations. Tons of junk mail from retailers. “The Gap?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I like their T-shirts.”
On the second page, I find something that might need a response. “They want you to be a keynote speaker at SouthwestLit.” A big literary conference held in New Mexico every fall.
“Email them back. Tell them I’m not available.”
I hesitate. “Do you want me to identify myself as writing on your behalf?”
“Of course not. Just pretend to be me.”
“How about Thank you for the honor; however, I have other obligations that preclude me from attending. ”
He nods his approval, so I type it, then hit Send.
“There are still several more pages, but it’s mostly junk. Do you want me to delete them or mark them as read?”
“I don’t give a shit, Olivia,” he sighs. I turn back to the computer and say, “Let me just…” but the rest of my sentence evaporates. On the screen in front of me, buried about halfway down, is a name that makes my stomach turn to lead.
John Calder.
***
It’s past midnight when I log into my father’s email on my own computer. All evening, I’d wrestled with the idea of whether I should read it, or if I should just let it go. But I can’t shake the discomfort of the two of them talking. Colluding. My father never mentioned he knew Calder, but there was an email in his in-box telling me otherwise.
The subject line simply says, Question . When I open the message, it’s short.
Just following up on this.
I notice that John has responded to an older email he sent, and I scroll down to read it.
A friend at Monarch tells me you’re writing a memoir. I’d love to pitch for it if you’re open to it. Please let me know.
I look at the date—March 12. The day after that first catastrophic Zoom with the Monarch team, when someone mentioned how they should have pitched Calder instead. I stretch back into my memory for the name. Tyler Blakewood.
Before I can change my mind, I click respond.
Tell me what you have in mind.
Then I hit Send.
***
Unable to sleep after that, I stare at the ceiling, turning over how to talk to Tom about this because he’s always been the person I turn to. He’d come with me to the Calder trial, sat behind me while the judge read his verdict, and then taken me to get drunk afterward. He’d counseled me, consoled me, listened to me, and even when he hadn’t agreed with my decisions—he’d advised strongly against that social media rant—he was always on my side.
I sit up and grab my phone, my fingers hesitating over the blank text screen, unsure of what to say. Of how to stay vague without unraveling all the lies I’ve told.
Instead, I grab my laptop and open it, transcribing a conversation with my father earlier today, zeroing in on a small exchange I’d wanted to revisit. It was about my parents, and it matched what others have always said about my father—that he was jealous. Volatile.
I shove my AirPods into my ears and rewind the recording back to the beginning of the segment, trying not to think about why John Calder is pitching for a book that is already under contract. Whether Monarch is letting me fail first before pulling the project from me. Which would likely force me to pay back my advance.
My voice resonates in my ears, and I push my worry away, focusing on work I know I can do better than John Calder.
Vincent : I used to sit on your mother’s porch, waiting for her to get home from track practice. I’d tell myself I just wanted to see her, but I was insecure. I wanted to make sure she’d been where she said she’d been.
Olivia : Did you do that often?
VT : Often enough.
O : And was she? Where she’d said she’d been?
VT : My mother had something she’d say whenever Poppy got too nosy: Sometimes, when you go looking for something, you might not like what you find.
O : That doesn’t answer the question.
VT : Sometimes your mother lied to me. Mostly because she didn’t want to upset me or make me jealous about things that didn’t matter, like her workouts with Mr. Stewart, which seemed to take up all her free time and energy.
O : Did you argue a lot?
VT : Not any more or less than other sixteen-year-olds flush with young love.
O : So was your mother right? Did you find something you didn’t like?
VT : Quiet. Contemplating. Probably. I don’t remember.
O : I need you to try. The memoir has to open you up so others can see your vulnerabilities. It’s how readers will know you’re telling the truth.
VT : You’re the liar, Lydia, not me.
The recording ends there, but I can still feel the shock, the shift from conversation to anger. The pain of hearing him spit her name at me, a warning.
But I’m also struck by the image of my father, sneaking out to check up on his girlfriend. Not trusting her. Following her. Obsessing over where she said she had been, and checking to make sure that was true.