Page 52 of Comfort Read

Shaking her head against him, Maggie mutters, “For God’s sake, Critter. Yes.”

Kit’s hands tighten around the back of her shirt without his telling them to. For the first time since he left Sage’s house—hell, for the first time since the day Emerson left him—what he lets out of his mouth next is a sob.

They have dinner the next night, just the five of them. Kit, his parents, Maggie, and even Justin gather around the same table they ate at when he was young, the conversation flowing over a pot of Cheryl’s famous spaghetti bolognese. Kit tells them everything: about Sage, about the bookstore, about his living situation, about how long and how desperately he’s been afraid of disappointing them. To his slightly shamed surprise, they listen. He’s pretty sure that Maggie, having apparently learned exactly nothing from recent events, went behind his back and gave them all a bit of a heads-up on what they were in for, but if she did, he’s grateful. It’s easier than it would have been if he’d had to force himself past their shocked expressions and exclamations of dismay, or interruptions demanding he explain in more detail. Instead, they just let him talk, and, when he’s done, they tell him they’re sorry: that it’s been so hard; that he’s been carrying this for so long; that he’s felt so alone. Even Justin says he’s sorry, which is honestly remarkable—Kit’s reasonably sure it’s the first time he’s heard the word come out of his brother’s mouth.

And then, over dessert, they make plans. Tom and Cheryl offer him his old bedroom, but Maggie waves that away before Kit has to explain how mortifying that would be, the whole town talking about him slinking back home. Instead, she insists he take the spare room at her and Mitch’s, pointing out that it would be useful to have someone around to help with the childcare. Justin sets up a crowdfunding page for the bookstore repairs right there at the table, reminding Kit as he taps away at his phone that Sawyer’s Books holds a special place in the hearts of many local academics, and promising he’ll talk to all of them in the days to come. Cheryl mentions that she’ll rally support from the local parents, and Tom, kindly and gently, suggests that Kit might want to talk to someone about what sounds to him like depression, and gives him the names of a few therapists he thinks Kit will like.

When the meal is over, they agree that Kit will start moving his things into Maggie’s tomorrow, and he pushes back his chair feeling both lighter and more whole than he has in years. Not just since everything with Emerson—since high school, maybe, or even before. He realizes as he walks towards the door that there’s been a pit deep within him, small at first but steadily widening, since the day of his childhood accident. Now, after all this time, he thinks it’s starting to close.

His mother grabs him by the wrist after Maggie and Justin have gone, just before he reaches the door to head out himself. “Look—something about that story reminded me—just, wait here a second, will you? I want to show you something, if I can find it, and if I’m right.”

He waits while his mother disappears down into the basement, growing more and more curious as he hears the unmistakable sound of her rummaging around in storage boxes. Finally, she returns, holding in her hand a dusty, yellowed sketchbook with the words Seline Rathbone Appreciation Society spelled out in rhinestones across the front.

“Mom,” Kit says, amazed and horrified. “Why do you have this?”

Airily, Cheryl waves a hand. “My life would have been very different if I hadn’t met your father, Kit; let’s just say that we’re all grateful and leave it at that, shall we? But: Look.” She flips through the notebook, which seems to be a collection of press clippings, until she gets to a large photo spread from what must have been Seline and John’s wedding. Despite everything, Kit’s heart jumps to his throat to see them smiling together, Seline’s slightly swollen stomach letting him know it’s a photo of Sage, too.

“Here,” she says, pointing to a tuxedo-clad man with his arm around John in one of the shots. “Is this him? The guy you met at dinner? Wayne?”

Kit stares, blinking hard. “I—yeah, you know what, I think so. A lot younger, obviously, but: Yeah, it’s him. That’s wild. But, I guess it makes sense—Sage said Wayne and his dad went way back⁠—”

“All the way back, I think,” Cheryl says, with a little grin of triumph. She slides her finger down to the caption, which Kit reads in amazement: Brothers John and Wayne Ballard celebrate his nuptials.

TWENTY-ONE

THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND WAYNE

In late July of 1961, Wayne Ballard became an older brother.

Though he was only a child himself at the time, Wayne had already discovered a passion for acquisition. From a young age he saw himself reflected in stories of dragons and their hoards—there was a security, a sense of solidifying his place in the world, in the simple act of having. A whole battery of therapists would tell him in adulthood that this was because of his parents, who struggled with alcohol, drugs, and holding down jobs. Many a bespectacled professional with a string of letters after their name had made it clear that this lack of stability was what drove Wayne’s propensity for possession.

Wayne was six when he acquired John, and that was always how he thought of it: as an acquisition. As though John was a packet of baseball cards he picked up one afternoon at a corner store. He had simply looked into John’s crib that first morning, staring down into the bright blue eyes and red, screaming face of the brand-new person before him, and thought: Okay, then. That’s mine.

They grew up together, John trailing Wayne like a shadow for the first few years, and then Wayne chasing after him as a cool breeze follows a storm. Their parents deteriorated—more drinking, more drugs, less stability every year. Wayne’s passion for acquisition shifted: Things were all well and good, but the key to a steady supply of them was money. He started taking on odd jobs, socking away his savings like one of the dragons of which he’d always been enamored.

John, too, developed a driving passion: a love for preservation, pinning down a moment or a feeling to be examined later in a different light. He told Wayne once that he woke up every morning burning as though he’d swallowed the sun, and all he wanted was to spit it back out again and cast the whole world in its glow. So when he asked Wayne to buy him a 35 mm film camera, Wayne agreed readily. The two of them were very different, but they shared a persistent difficulty in connecting with other people, and Wayne was happy to spend his money on anything that helped John communicate.

Wayne loved John. John loved the camera. The light that shone in his eyes as he watched the neighborhood kids laugh, or gasp, or wince away from the strange early films he cut together: That was worth it to Wayne. Worth giving John the money he was forever asking for to fund his hobby; worth weathering the black moods into which John would descend when he couldn’t achieve the outcome he wanted; worth even their father’s mockery, his insistence that John would never make anything half as good as the classic Westerns after which his sons were named.

Eventually Wayne went off to college, studying finance and economics. A few years later John went to Los Angeles, talked his way into small crew roles on film sets. He drank too much and partied too hard, something Wayne, who had no interest in anything but sobriety, worried about. He learned how people made real movies, not just amateur, childish imitations to screen in his parents’ backyard. He was nineteen when he came to Wayne with his biggest idea yet: the two of them going into the movie business together. John would handle the filmmaking and artistic decisions, and Wayne would be in charge of the business, the money. College had taught Wayne more than enough to know that it was a risky plan, that people with a lot more capital and connections than he did had lost it all in Hollywood.

But Wayne loved John, and John loved the camera. Ballard Brothers Productions was incorporated later that same week, and Wayne put every penny he had behind it.

Their first film was a box office flop, but the critics loved it. To John, that was success. He had his favorite review framed, a sparse two paragraphs buried deep in the Arts & Leisure section. It called the film inspired, and him a visionary, and it hung in every office John ever used until the day that he died.

Their second film, thrown together on an even more shoestring budget, did better, at least in Wayne’s eyes. They made money instead of losing it—not much money, but enough to keep them in the black. Wayne was pleased. John was gutted. Critics called the movie derivative, too commercial, “a sad comedown from the chaotic brilliance of their breakout film.” This last was a sentence John often repeated verbatim, generally into the long neck of a whiskey bottle. Wayne pointed out that they’d made enough money to avoid being shut down, which didn’t seem to comfort John at all. Wayne pointed out that more people had seen this film, and thus, presumably, liked it, and John had snorted and refused to meet his eyes. Putting together their third film was the only thing that could pull him up from his nosedive, at least enough to get him out of the bars.

And then, when they started casting, they got lucky, and found Seline.

It was a classic Hollywood story: the director and the actress, the visionary and the ingénue, the dark brooding genius and the bright bubbly blonde. John “discovered” her, in the sense that he was the first person to cast her in something more substantial than a commercial for carpet cleaner, which helped drive the buzz around them. And it didn’t hurt that the film, The Vanishing City, did well critically and at the box office, netting them more than their previous two films combined. John credited that to Seline, insisted that she was his muse, that he’d never fully lived before he met her—she’d awakened, he liked to say, a part of himself that had been asleep since the day he was born, and he’d loved her impossibly for it. Wayne had loved her, too; Wayne would have loved anyone who steadied his brilliant but mercurial brother.

They had six good years, the three of them. Four movies—two big wins, one that did fine, and one flop that critics adored. Two houses in the Hollywood Hills only a few blocks apart, and a third for occasional visits and vacations in the Finger Lakes, near where John and Wayne grew up. One wedding. One baby. John got sober, said fatherhood required it. Seline got famous, and then really famous, landing roles in pictures so big that John’s star rose by proxy. The future looked bright.

Then Seline’s brother came to town.

Sometimes, in the small hours of particularly bad days, Wayne still wishes he’d gone home to Ithaca the first time he laid eyes on Nick’s smug, smiling face and pulled his father’s pistol out of the top dresser drawer. He would have spent the rest of his life in jail for shooting the man in cold blood, but by God, it would have been worth it. If Nick had died before he could sink his claws in, then Wayne knows, he’s sure, that John wouldn’t have. He’d be here still, making dozens more brilliant movies and a few that were only fine; answering Wayne’s calls; giving his son a whole different set of issues than the ones he ended up with.

But Wayne didn’t shoot Nick in cold blood. He made nice. He tried to get along. Nick was Seline’s brother, after all, and Wayne knew what it was to love your sibling so much you wanted to give them the world. When Nick took over as Seline’s manager, Wayne understood, or thought he did. When Nick started spending more time with John, keeping him out later and later, Wayne at least tried to understand.