The New York book launch for Come Hang Yourself was in the Barnes & Noble with the escalators on East Seventeenth Street in Union Square. I loved that bookstore; I’d read there a few times. The authors’ readings were on one of the upper floors. From where you faced the audience, you could see people riding up the escalator—as if someone in the seated crowd had imagined them. The divine souls on the escalator were looking right at you; they appeared to be ascending to heaven, leaving you behind. I was explaining this optical illusion to Grace, while the booksellers kept Em out of sight in a back room. I told Grace I wanted to forewarn Em about the “levitating apparitions” on the escalator.

“You and your apparitions,” Grace said. I shouldn’t have shown Grace my Aspen screenplay—both the Loge Peak beginning and the Not a Ghost ending. Either Loge Peak or Not a Ghost was a good title, but I knew no one would make the movie—no matter what I called it. It wasn’t just too long. “The first-person voice-over is passé—Jules et Jim was third-person voice-over, you know. And The Little Mermaid is Disney—the rights to Jodi Benson’s singing ‘Part of Your World’ would cost you a fortune,” Grace told me.

I’d overlooked the expense of clips from “Part of Your World”—I’d been thinking how Toby Goode would feel, seeing his dead mom hum that song to a cowboy ghost. I didn’t say this to Grace. I’d told her that I knew my Aspen screenplay would never be made. Eliminating my passé voice-over wouldn’t fix it. To begin with, everyone would know who the Paul Goode and Clara Swift characters were, no matter what names I gave them. When I’d shown my Aspen screenplay to Em, she said: “Not only should Matthew never read this—he should never know this. The same goes for your half brother, Toby Goode,” Em told me.

“I know,” I said. Matthew was only six. I was thinking I didn’t have to hide or destroy my Aspen screenplay, whatever I decided to call it—not just yet. Matthew wasn’t reading screenplays.

At six, Matthew was fixated on Em’s house in Toronto—he had no interest in unmade movies. “I wish I could see the house with the rooms that don’t know what they are—the poor rooms!” Matthew kept saying. Em had succeeded in making Matthew interested in her mystery house before he’d seen it. There’d even been talk of a sightseeing trip to Toronto at the end of the school year. I was the one thinking about unmade movies.

“There are more unmade movies than anyone knows,” my father had said, in the same way he had said I had my mother’s hands: “Ray was always wringing her hands.”