by Lisa Beazley
You shouldn’t find it a surprise that Lulu and River and I have left. We’ll stay with Cassie and I’ll be in touch. I’m sorry I didn’t give you a chance to say goodbye to the kids. You are, of course, welcome to visit them anytime, but as you know, I can’t stay in Singapore, and our marriage is over anyway. I assume you can transfer back to the Columbus office if you want to be closer to us. Thank you for Lulu, who is a beautiful, beautiful gift. She is part you, so I could never hate you. I still have love for you and respect the way you faced the music when everything happened. But please know there is no chance of us getting back together. I wish you peace. Love, Sid I posted that, and within an hour, we had fifty-some comments. The most amusing ones included marriage proposals to Sid, offers to “mess up” Adrian, you-go-girl notes, how-dare-you-take-a-man’s-child-away comments, a handful of sob stories, and all kinds of advice. I watched her, to see if she would have the same reaction that I did. To my surprise, she started writing back to a few of the commenters, something I couldn’t bring myself to do. We stayed up until two a.m., drinking wine and reading and responding to comments. At one point we searched Twitter and discovered that #SlowNews was trending. It wasn’t so much about our blog, though; people were snapping shots of their own handwritten letters and tagging them as #SlowNews. The next day, despite four hours of sleep plus jet lag and a vague hangover, I had an idea. It had been stewing for a while—this notion that I should make lemonade out of the extraordinary lemon that was the Slow News Sisters. And in some ways I already had, but I wanted to pass along the gift I’d received. To widen the circle, so to speak. In many of the comments, I sensed a yearning to share. People poured out little pieces of their hearts under the guise of offering me advice or support or even criticism, but really they just wanted to be heard, to be seen. Other commenters wrote about how much they loved handwritten letters—the “art form,” so many called it, and then, of course, the whole Slow News hashtag really got me thinking. I walked to the dreaded post office on Varick Street, remembering to bring two forms of ID and two proofs of address, and signed up for a PO box. Back at home I deleted the letter to Leo and, with Sid’s permission, hers to Adrian. I put up a new post, explaining that we were turning the blog over: Anyone who wanted to say they were sorry could do it here. I couldn’t guarantee clemency, but I could promise a safe space for admitting mistakes and asking forgiveness. At the very least, it could provide a few virtual nods of encouragement. To a person in deep trouble, that’s an attractive offer. What I didn’t admit was I had an inkling that if this became a thing, the biggest beneficiary of all would be me. It hardly seemed fair that this could be the case, but perhaps my punishment was complete. While I was sitting at the computer, I received a text from Leo: Thx for the letter. Take it down now, okay? Already did, I texted him back. Posting the letter had served an important purpose, if not the one I’d originally had in mind. Now it was time to officially close that public chapter of my life and do some making up—and growing up—outside the spotlight. I had no way of knowing whether Leo read the responses and how he felt if he had. But it didn’t matter, because his experience with this whole thing was his own. Whether or not to forgive me was his choice alone, and I didn’t want him to feel ganged up on. Those comments were for me, and they would hold me up, whispering in my ear that I could do it, while I went about the business of rebuilding my family. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
On Friday we pulled up to the Westchester house in our rented minivan. It was a big refurbished barn with an attached silo sitting on a piece of land at least as big as Bleecker and Leroy Street playgrounds put together, and the boys immediately went nuts. River stayed outside with them while Sid and I found the key under the mat and unloaded the car.
The entry looked down onto a sunken living room with a fireplace and huge windows showing off the woods behind the house. It was even better than in the pictures Jill had sent. We plunked our bags down and walked through the open dining area to our right, which led to a big warm kitchen, where a cluster of copper pots hung from a rack over a cooking island. The kitchen led back to the living room. Although everything was open and bright, the wall of trees encircling the property gave the house a cozy and enclosed feeling. Immediately glad we’d decided to rent the house for the entire week, I looked forward to settling in. The silo was actually a separate house with its own entrance. It had a circular living room, bathroom, kitchenette, and two bedrooms, all stacked atop one another. River was taken with it immediately, so Sid and Lulu took one bedroom while he took the other, which the boys were delighted to discover was accessible via a “secret” tunnel on the second-story landing of the main house. We explored the house and woods, then all had dinner together. Once bedtime for the kids was done and River was in his room, Sid and I dumped a big bag of mail out on the living room floor and lost ourselves in other people’s problems. In the four days since I’d posted the invitation to send letters in for the blog, I’d received close to three hundred responses. Some of the apologies made us laugh, a few made us cry, and several made us cringe with discomfort. I’d heard Sid gasp, groan, and giggle through the letters, and she, me. We decided to curate them after reading a few we suspected to be rejected Penthouse submissions, describing adulterous trysts in graphic detail. Sighing, I added to the to-scan pile one from a seventeen-year-old who’d cheated on his true love when he went on a college visit. When I glanced at Sid, she was sitting up straight and gripping a letter with both hands. She didn’t appear to be breathing. “Got yourself a good one there?” I said. She didn’t answer, and in fact didn’t even seem to hear me. I kept watching her, and when she finally folded the paper back up, she said quietly, “It’s from Kenny.” “Who’s Kenny?” I said. She said nothing but looked at me, waiting for it to sink in. “Oh my God, Kenny.” “Yep.” She nodded in slow motion. “Holy shit. What does he say?” She handed me the letter and lay on the ground in what I now know as corpse pose. Dear Sid,
I bet you never thought you’d hear from me again. This is an apology. I am sorry for so many things. I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, and about our child. I thought about calling you so many times, but the years slipped by and now here we are. You might want to throw this letter away, and I wouldn’t blame you. You may have heard, but in case you’re curious about me, I toured for the next year and then right around the time Jerry died, I spent seven months in jail after getting busted with just the wrong amount of LSD, and then six years working as a bison observer, counting and charting alone in the woods in Wyoming. I found great comfort in silence, and I studied meditation at a center in Montana. I married a nice woman I met at a silent retreat and we have a ten-year-old daughter named Robin. We divorced four years ago and she moved to New York with her new husband, so I moved out there to be closer to Robin. I’ve been writing music for a long time, and I run the occasional retreat at a meditation center in the Catskills. Some famous singers recorded a few of my songs, and I’ve been able to make a living that way. You may have heard some—you know that song on the Subaru commercial where the family is driving through the woods at night? It’s about you, actually. I’ve thought about you every day. I don’t know why I ran away; I think it had something to do with how terrible a dad my father was. He died this year, and I’ve hardly been able to think about anything else but you and our son (I ran into Kelly Krieger at a show a year after I split and she told me you had a boy). I should have been there for you. I’m sure you have been an awesome mom, and maybe he has someone he knows as Dad—I don’t know—but I would love to meet him. I understand if you can’t allow that. I have a college fund for him that I’d like to give you. He doesn’t need to know where it came from if you don’t want him to. My ex-wife told me about this blog and said that the women in it had the same names as you and your sister (yes, my ex knows all about you), but when I finally went to check it out, I saw this open call for apologies, and so I took it
as a sign that I should write this and hope it finds you. I’m sorry for any hard times you’ve had that I might have helped with. I wish I had done things differently. With love, Kenny Fisher The next day I asked Sid if she wanted me to post the letter. “I don’t know. We’d have to ask River,” she said. “Good point. So what did he say about the news?” “He’s intrigued. It’s hard to say, really. He said he’d meet him. Kenny’s coming here on Sunday.” She showed me the e-mail she sent him, which, like Kenny’s letter, never did end up on the blog. Kenny,