Page 28 of The Ghostwriter

There are ten film reels in all. Three from March, two from April, four from May, and one from June. Such a short period of time. And such a consequential one.

I spool out one of the reels—the one labeled March #1 in Poppy’s familiar handwriting—and hold the film up to the light. Jack leans in, our heads touching as we each try to see what’s on it. Tiny shapes move across it—people I can’t quite recognize, rooms and locations all unfamiliar—1975 alive and waiting for me to discover.

He looks at me, grinning. “I think you have your next steps.”

People’s recollections are tinted with their own biases. Their beliefs, layered over the top, sometimes rendering a completely different meaning. Red becomes purple. Yellow becomes green. I’d always believed my father had invented Lionel Foolhardy, until he’d presented me with evidence to the contrary. There’s a reason historians rely so heavily on primary sources. Because human memory is flawed.

Up until this moment, all I’ve had to work with was my father’s broken memory and Poppy’s cryptic diary. But now I have the film that will unlock everything.

***

“I’ve got ten Super 8 reels I need transferred to digital.” I’ve driven straight to Ventura with the movies. Jack had given me a rain check on that drink and made me promise to tell him if there was anything earth-shattering on the film.

The man behind the counter nods and says, “Let’s have a look.”

I pull them out of my bag and stack them in front of me, and he opens one of the reels, peering at a few inches of film. “These are pretty old,” he says.

“My aunt shot them when she was a young girl in 1975,” I tell him. “We just found them.”

“You won’t have any sound on these,” he says, tracing a finger along the edge. “There’s a gold band that runs along the base that recorded sound.” He spools out a few more inches of film. “This one doesn’t have that.” He wraps it back up again and slides on the lid. “I can put these on a flash drive, or I can email you a link.”

“A link would be great. How soon can you get them done?”

He slides all ten reels to the side and consults a notebook open next to the register. “I have a couple jobs ahead of this one, but definitely by end of the day.”

I smile. “Perfect. Thank you.”

***

When I get back to my father’s, he waylays me in the living room. “Olivia,” he says. He’s sitting at the dining room table. “Where have you been?”

I push down a wave of anger, thinking of the words he wrote on the wall of his dead sister’s closet, of the home movies I’ve just found. The house that he still owns, that he neglected to tell me about. The lies and half-truths he’s been feeding me, the information he’s conveniently forgotten. I freeze, suddenly terrified he can read my mind, that he will somehow know what I’ve learned about him. “The library,” I tell him. “Fact checking.”

He taps the table in front of my old seat and says, “Let’s get some work done.”

I can’t. There’s no way I can sit across from him and listen to him tell me more stories. More lies. “I’ve got a splitting headache,” I tell him. “And a call with my agent.”

He stares at me a beat and I wonder if he can see the lie. When I was young, I used to wonder if he had special powers, always seeming to know when I wasn’t telling the truth. But finally he nods and says, “There’s Advil and Tylenol in the upstairs bathroom if you need it.”

I grip my phone, thinking of the photo on it—the words on Poppy’s wall. Someday soon, you’ll be dead. “Thanks,” I say, and then push past him, out into the courtyard, taking the stairs two at a time and standing, breathless, my back against the closed door of the guesthouse.

Jack’s question comes back to me. How would you handle this if it wasn’t your father, your family, you were writing about? What would you do next?

***

My shoulders ache from several hours spent hunched over my father’s notepads when the films drop into my in-box. Ten links with names that match what was written on the outside of the film canisters. I download the first one on the list, labeled March #2 , tapping my fingers on the desk, impatient.

A flickering black screen flashes for a few seconds, and then I’m seeing my father’s neighborhood as it was in 1975. The film is color, but it’s faded with age, giving everything an antique patina. The neighbor’s house is vacant, a For Sale sign in front of it. I think about who might have lived there at the time of the murders, and how long they remained afterward.

The camera pans from left to right, taking in the street with its 1970s-era cars—old-school Fords, a shiny Volkswagen Bug, and a Camaro—the tree across the street smaller but recognizable. The grass in the front yard of the house looks healthier than the crabgrass that lives there now, and I imagine my grandfather tending it on weekends. Mowing it, fertilizing it, watering it. Or maybe that was a job for my father or Danny. A chore they had to complete before they could play with their friends on a Saturday.

I’m hungry for a glimpse of Poppy. To see her smile and laugh, even if I can’t hear her voice any longer. But she’s behind the camera. She turns and walks in through the front door of the house. And there, on the couch watching television, are my parents. Teenage Vincent is skinny—all elbows and knees poking out of a T-shirt and shorts. But it’s my mother I can’t take my eyes from. I pause the film to study her.

She has the lean legs of a runner, and I remember my father mentioning once that she’d been good enough to get a scholarship to college to run track, but that life had different plans.

I press Play again and see my father say something to Poppy behind the camera, and my mother laughs, her face cracking open into a wide grin that lights her up. I ache to hear her. To have her smile at me that way.

Poppy shifts away from them and walks through the dining room, where their mother is working on a puzzle and drinking from a mug. She has a scarf tied around her head, and she looks up at her daughter and smiles, then gestures her away, camera shy.

I never knew my grandmother. She died a few months after I was born. Aside from that one photo in the newspaper from the funeral, there are no pictures of her from the time after Poppy and Danny died, and few from before. To see her smiling and laughing, the graceful way she shoos her daughter away, the long fingernails on her hands painted a pale pink. I wish I could reach into the movie and grab her, tell her what was to come in just a few months’ time, beg her to stay home, not to go into Ventura to see that movie. The events of June 13 killed her as well, it just took longer for her to die.

But this is who she was. Her true self, the woman who raised my father, who raised three children for a short while. And it breaks my heart all over again to know what’s ahead for her.

The screen goes dark for a split second, then lights up again with a different scene. Poppy has the camera pressed up against a door, open just a crack. Through it, I can see Danny—so young, so handsome—lying on his bed reading a book. The camera zooms in on him, tipping the door open a little bit more. The motion must catch his attention because he looks up, straight into the camera. His eyes are a piercing blue, set against the black of his hair, and I can see why he was so popular. My body tenses, thinking of the stories my father has told me. About how angry Danny would get when someone came into their room uninvited. How he used to rage against Poppy following him everywhere with her camera.

But on the screen, Danny sits up, grins, and throws the book at Poppy, who peels away right before it hits her. I rewind and watch it again, looking for hints of the person my father has described. An ominous flicker beneath Danny’s smile. A flash of temper suppressed. But I don’t see any evidence of that boy at all.

I watch different scenes from their home—their father smoking a cigarette on the back porch, then a panoramic view of Poppy’s bedroom cluttered with stuffed animals. And there are the collages my father told me about—images of ERA activists at marches and rallies. A giant Equal Rights poster next to her desk.

Poppy approaches her bed and the view from the camera turns around, facing the door, lowering as she sits. My father again comes into view, poking his head into the room, making faces. Saying something else that makes my mother, lurking behind him in the hallway, laugh. It’s surreal to see expressions and emotions bloom across their faces as opposed to the static smiles in photographs. To see their gestures, the way they move. It’s hard to fathom that these moments still exist while the rest of the world has moved on.

But I still haven’t seen Poppy. Every now and then I get a glimpse of a hand, shooting out to direct someone. But here, there is nothing of her at all. Just her world, her life, viewed through her eyes.

This reel ends, a series of jumbled moments, much like my father’s manuscript. I quickly download the next attachment and start to watch. But this one, from May, is different. It takes me a while to figure out that it’s the high school gym. In the film, a man wearing coveralls is on a ladder, methodically scrubbing away spray-painted words— fuck you —from the wall. Poppy keeps the camera on him for several seconds, then zooms in on the floor beneath the ladder, panning right and then left. I lean closer to my laptop, trying to see what she’s seeing, but it’s too pixelated.

The next clip is of a burned-out shell of an equipment shed, the blackened interior revealing the paraphernalia of a 1970s PE curriculum. Melted plastic hockey sticks poking out of a metal trash can. The blackened edges of what I think were red handballs, soccer balls, and basketballs.

Poppy pulls away from the shed and she’s walking down a narrow alleyway between two buildings. Then the camera tilts to one side, as if being pulled away from her face, and turns off. When it’s on again, we’re somewhere else. It’s night, and Poppy is filming out her bedroom window, the camera poking through her curtains. I recognize the shadow of my teenage father sneaking across the backyard. Poppy zooms in to show him disappearing into a nearby grove of trees.

The rest of this reel is more of that. My father alone, surreptitious. Once, he sees her filming him and he approaches the camera. I watch, fascinated to see my father’s younger face up close. So many familiar landmarks—the hairline that dips in the center of his forehead, the way his ears stick out. But his cheeks are fuller. His eyes aren’t so sunken. As he grows closer, Poppy keeps the camera trained on him. He’s angry. He reaches out, grabs the camera, and I see a flash of sky. A flash of Poppy’s hand, her hair, and then the picture goes dark.

Not exactly how my father has described things to me. I get out my own notebook and Poppy’s diary, ready to match the clips with Poppy’s entries, hoping I can follow the trail of clues she’s left me. And so, I go back to the beginning.

May 6, 1975

I heard a rumor today. That Lydia was pregnant and now…she’s not .

And then the next one:

Something’s on that film that Vince doesn’t want me to see. March #1, Clip #3.

I label my notebook with the entry and the clip, then download it from the list of attachments, fast-forwarding until I get to the third clip. It’s a party. Kids gathered around a bonfire, flames dancing into the dark sky. Poppy’s camera pans in close to the flames, then eases out, the frame growing larger, pulling in more figures: shadowy couples making out, three girls dancing in a circle, their arms held above their heads. My imagination fills in the soundtrack—maybe Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin—the high-pitched laughter of the girls, the low voices of boys growing into men. It’s shadowy and dark, and I pause the frame every few seconds, trying to see what Poppy wants me to see. But it’s just kids at a party. On the far left side of the screen, the figure of a man I can’t quite make out—an older brother? Someone’s dad?—is picking up empty soda cans and dropping them into a garbage bag. People I don’t recognize, teenagers mugging for Poppy’s camera.

I rewind and watch again. The same dancing girls. The same flames reaching toward the sky. The same man cleaning up. I make a note to see if I can find an old yearbook, to match some of these faces with names and then go backward, trying to figure out if any of them were relevant at the time. Whether any of them knew my mother. Perhaps one of them was the father of her baby. There aren’t any more references to the clips on the March reels, so I skip ahead to the next reference in May.

May 10: I don’t even know who he is anymore. May #1, Clip #7.

I’m barely two seconds in when I sit forward in my chair, a zip of recognition passing through me. Because it feels familiar, as if I’ve seen it before. The camera pans through the wooded area near my father’s house, and Poppy seems to be walking slowly. In the distance, I can make out a figure, hunched over a shovel. Digging. My mind fills in the gaps, just the way my father described this scene to me. The sound of the leaves crunching, the smell of damp soil, the steady thump of the shovel. This is what I’ve needed. Corroboration of my father’s stories. Confirmation that he’s been telling me the truth. He hadn’t mentioned that Poppy had been with him when he’d come across Danny burying the neighbor’s cat. Or perhaps my father had swiped the camera and filmed this himself.

Either way, I stare at the screen, watching it unfold, exactly as he described it. The camera zooms in as close as possible, and I can make out the bloody bundle that must have been the cat. But it’s the boy who catches my attention. That has me slamming my thumb down on the space bar to pause the video.

Because it’s not Danny burying the cat.

It’s my father.