Free Found by Tatum O'neal Page B

it would all fall apart, but the night before the shoot, Ryan was in a good mood, happy and laughing, and I had high hopes for the coming days.
    The next morning was overcast and cool. Around ten a.m., the crew, producers, and others started arriving at the Malibu house.Ryan emerged from his bedroom half an hour later. He made a grand, Norma Desmond–style entrance, which he timed carefully, making sure everyone was assembled downstairs and waiting before he descended the staircase. Later he would explain that he did this as a joke that nobody got. I asked him how his back was, and he said he didn’t feel great and hadn’t slept well. I was nervous because I could tell he was nervous.
    They taped the whole day, shooting footage of the two of us playing Frisbee, walking on the beach, sitting on a couch in my dad’s living room talking. My father kept saying that everything was great. To hear it, the past was but a distant memory. Our relationship was sunshine and roses. My dad kept saying, “I lost her once; I’m never going to lose her again.” But I felt like it wasn’t real. The sunshine and roses weren’t exactly the whole picture. Wasn’t the point of the show to reconcile? And didn’t reconciliation start with confrontation? At some point, we had to start talking about what had happened.
    The producers were trying to understand what had caused the rift between us. What, they kept asking, had made the fissure so longstanding and painful? Finally, Ryan said, “I left Tatum for Farrah. That’s the rub.” The producers then spent the next six hours asking us every question there was to ask. I tried to offer long, thorough answers to what were pretty tough questions. Then Ryan broke in and said, “Oh yeah, also the fact that I wasn’t invited to your wedding, and I was virtually abandoned by you.” I started explaining to Ryan that at the time I had no control—that John didn’t like him, that I was pregnant and felt mentally beaten down by John, and that I knew that no one tells John McEnroe what to do, especially his pregnant twenty-two-year-old fiancée.
    Ryan accused me of never inviting him and Farrah to John’s tennis matches. “When you did come,” I said, “you left in the second match of the second round.” I explained that, as far as John was concerned, if you were a family member and you were there to watch him play, you had better watch the first match all the way through to the end of the tournament. John felt that it brought him bad luck if a family member left during a match, which my dad did during the U.S. Open, the first time he went to see John play. Afterward, my dad offered some lame reason that he had to go do something in Los Angeles. Whether or not that was true, John was so angry with my dad that he never invited him back to another match, which I now tried to explain to Ryan.
    Plus, I reminded him, that was more than twenty-five years ago! I got very emotional and started crying. The last thing I expected was for him to lay into me about the past. Was this what he was holding on to after all these years? Inside, I was saying, What about me? Do you have any idea what it was like for me?
    For the shoot, the crew had arranged the cameras in the ground-floor entrance hall, outside my old room. To access an outlet, the production team moved a couch. There, behind the couch, looped around the banister, was an old, forgotten wire bike chain. Halfway through the day, when I noticed it, a chill ran through me. I knew exactly why that wire was in that odd place, although I couldn’t believe my incredibly neat father had never noticed and removed it. This hallway had once been a crime scene, and the wire was evidence of the damage done.
    In 2007, Griffin had called me in New York and given me alarming news. He said that Redmond had been shooting up. Our half-brother Redmond—we’d always loved him and