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“I’m in the middle of a breakthrough. Come in. Come in. Hurry.”
Maddox and I shared a look and then followed Dad inside. As eccentric as ever.
He was working in my old bedroom. A canvas was on the ground, and there was paint everywhere. It half-looked like he’d been suspended from something and thrown paint from the ceiling. Luckily, he’d had the forethought to put a sheet over the bed.
“Dad, what the hell are you doing?”
“Genius,” he said without a hint of joking.
Maddox turned his head to the side. “I like it. It kind of reminds me of the kaleidoscopes we had as kids. If you look at it from another perspectives, it’s a different picture.”
“Yes, yes!” my dad said. “He gets it.”
I hugged the book to my chest and waited for them to be finished. It was another half hour, in which Maddox got paint all over his shirt and in his curly hair. I picked my feet up and backed farther away from the mess.
“Okay. That’s it for today. Let’s go into the living room.”
“Dad, you should change.”
“Right you are.”
He disappeared into the back and came out a few minutes later in fresh clothing. Maddox had stripped out of his shirt and dug through his duffel to find a fresh one. Finally, we all sat down in the living room. Dad had gotten us all beers.
“What’s this all about? I’m glad you’re here, but you didn’t seem like yourself on the phone.”
I took a deep breath and launched into my pitch. It was harder to ask this of my dad, considering he was the first victim of the entire ordeal. I knew he didn’t want to relive what had happened or have hundreds or thousands or even millions of other people to relive it with him. But I needed his permission before I proceeded.
At the end, Dad was struck silent. He ran a hand across his beard and then held his hand out. “That’s the journal?”
“A copy. I had one made for you.” I put it in his hand. “She loved you, Dad. And … she was protecting me the best she could. I believe that now.”
“And Edward really … hit her?” he asked. His hand clenched tight around the book, his knuckles white at the thought.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Did he ever raise a hand to you?”
I shook my head. “No. I barely saw him when I was there. That’s why she asked me to come in the summers—because he was gone. I had no idea until I read the journal.”
He sighed heavily. “I wish she’d told me.”
There was so much weight in those words. An entire lifetime of what could have been.
“Me too.”
The silence was heavy, but I let it hang. Let my dad process everything I’d told him. It was a lot to take in. It had been for me, and he’d been there for half of it.
Finally, he met my gaze again. “And you want to make this into a movie?”
“I do. I feel like I’m finally following my passion again.”
“All right,” he said with a nod. “I can’t guarantee I’ll read it. I don’t know if I want to know all of Rebecca’s inner thoughts. But I won’t stop you from creating. Not when you’ve done so much for me all these years.”
I jumped to my feet and wrapped my arms around my dad’s shoulders. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Just promise to come back with Maddox more often.”
I laughed and swiped at my tears. I met Maddox’s gaze, and he nodded. “Definitely.”
“I’d be happy to,” Maddox agreed.
“Well, when do you start?” Dad asked.
“Now.”
Maddox coughed up a lungful of dust. “Jesus, has anyone gone through the stuff in this attic ever?”
“Not for years,” my mom said. She waved her hand in front of her face to clear the dust.
“Rebecca, allow me to introduce you to the show Hoarders.”
I cracked up. “Mom isn’t a hoarder. This is just the attic, Maddox.”
“Just because she can hide her hoarding doesn’t make it any less hoarding.”
“Well, won’t you thank me when you don’t have to do all new costumes for the movie?” Mom said.
Maddox snorted and then started coughing again.
“Go downstairs if you can’t handle the dust,” I said as I navigated the towers of boxes in my mother’s attic.
Developing my mother’s journal to a film was an endeavor like I’d never gone through. I’d had to fall heavily back into things that I’d learned at SCAD when I was first trying to get into directing. I’d reached out to my film advisor from college about the direction. We’d set up weekly meetings for consultations on the project.
But Maddox had been right. What really got me through was my experience on Academy. All of the directors I’d worked with on different episodes of the show. The hours of rehearsing lines and filming and acting and dealing with technical direction. The millions of little things that I’d acquired over the years were now a fount of knowledge in my head.
