Page 22 of The Ghostwriter

May 8, 1975

Every year on my birthday, my father gives a toast. “When was born, she was beauty and grace and light. And she continues to be that, all her beautiful days.”

But my father doesn’t see me for who I am. In his mind, I’m his baby, his little girl. Smiles and laughter and light . But light casts shadows. And it’s always been the shadows that interest me the most. The idea that certain things thrive there, that the dark is where secrets live, and I want to understand them. To seek them out. To peer into people’s darkest places and bring the truth out into the open.

For my fourteenth birthday, I asked for a Super 8 camera. I told my parents it was so we could record family memories—birthdays, holidays, special events. My mother was skeptical. My father was amused.

But film won’t lie the way memories do. I want a record of things that happen so people can’t brush off my feelings and tell me I’m overreacting, or I don’t understand.

I want to document my brothers fighting. All boys love to rough and tumble.

My mother’s drinking. Everyone has wine at the end of the day.

But I know better. I know it’s not normal. If I can film it, people will see what I see, and they will believe me.

I sit now with my father’s old projector and a bedsheet covering a wall of boxes in the garage—one of the only dark spaces in the house. I’ve loaded my first reel and turned the lights off. The sheet isn’t smooth, warping the images as they flicker in front of me. My birthday party in early March, just a couple minutes of me spinning in a circle, catching my parents at the picnic table outside, Vince on the back steps and Danny by the fire.

I hate that there isn’t any sound, but I couldn’t afford it.

Ned, the owner of the camera shop, had seen how disappointed I was and tried to cheer me up. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “You can get more for your money if you go without sound.” He winked. “Besides, when you can’t hear the words people use to distract you, you focus on what they’re doing instead. The truth lives in people’s actions, their unguarded moments, not in the lies they tell.”

Turns out, Ned was right.

It’s easy to see the way my mother wobbles when she stands to dance with my father, her wineglass nearly empty. The wistful way Vince looks when he thinks no one is watching him. An unguarded laugh from Danny makes me realize how long it’s been since I’ve seen him so relaxed. So happy.

The party cuts away and I’m wandering through the house. Vincent and Lydia on the couch. I lean closer to the screen so I can study the way his hand strokes her arm. How she leans in to him, soaking up his attention.

Behind me, I hear someone enter the garage. I glance over my shoulder to see Vince, drinking a soda. “My first reel,” I tell him.

He comes closer. “Cool.”

Together we watch as the scene shifts again. The bonfire party at Mr. Stewart’s old house. The tall flames spiraling high into the night, sparks caught on film, bright dots of light melting into the dark. The camera zooms out to show groups of kids dancing, sitting on lawn chairs and in the dirt, the shadows of trees behind them. I can still hear the music—Grateful Dead. Eric Clapton. The Who. A kid I don’t know grabs a laughing girl around the waist and pulls her toward him.

“Turn it off,” Vince says, his voice a low warning. He moves closer to the sheet, staring at it.

“What?” I ask. “Why?”

He turns to me, his cheeks growing flushed. “I said, TURN IT OFF.” He grabs the bedsheet and yanks it down, the images vanishing against the brown boxes behind it.

I cut the projector. “It was just a party, Vince. There will be others.”

Vince drops the bedsheet on the floor, and I move to pick it up before it can get dirty. But he stops me. Shoves me toward the wall, then tries to pull the reel off the projector.

“What are you doing?” I shout, grabbing the projector before it can topple over. I get a sharp elbow into my chest as he tries to push me away. “Vince, what’s your problem?” But my gaze cuts toward the film, wondering what he’d seen that had set him off.

Our mother opens the door to the garage and says, “What’s going on in here?”

We leap apart, but I keep my hands on the projector, protecting it.

Vince pushes past me, past our mother still standing in the doorway, and disappears.

My mother stares at me a beat and then points at the sheet, still on the floor. “That better not have a speck of dirt on it.” Then she, too, disappears.

I slowly unroll the film from the projector and place it back in the canister I’d carefully labeled March #1 , my hands shaking, my chest aching where Vince had elbowed me, and a thump of worry passes through me, knowing he would have destroyed this reel if my mother hadn’t interrupted. I think of the arguments he and Lydia have been having. The whispered ones they think no one can hear, and the louder ones they have when they think no one else is around. What I know about Lydia that Vince doesn’t. I think again of the images of my family, their unguarded moments caught on film to be studied later. And I wonder what else I might be able to see when I go back and really look.