The Dance (Original Series Part 2)

Love Is (Finale)

Christmas Eve, Wednesday, December 24, 1997

It was eight o'clock when Stevie finished getting ready for bed. She was hours ahead of schedule, usually not going to bed until four or five o'clock in the morning, but since The Dance tour had ended, she'd been sleeping more and more, sometimes not even making it out of bed at all during the day. Tomorrow morning at seven she was being picked up by limousine to go to the airport so she could spend Christmas and New Years in Arizona with her family, and she knew she would be exhausted if she didn't go to sleep early. She brought out her journal and debated turning on the TV to have in the background as she wrote, knowing It's A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story would both be on if she looked hard enough, but she decided against it. She couldn't lie there and watch a Christmas movie now...or any festive thing where people were smiling and having fun. All she could think of was that it had been exactly twenty-four days since she had seen or spoken to Lindsey, that he had done as she'd asked and stayed away, but she hadn't counted on it hurting quite this much, so much so that any images of Christmas cheer made her start to cry in a mixture of anger and sadness that she hadn't felt since Christmas 1982, her first Christmas without Robin. How the hell was she going to go through a Nicks family holiday this way? 

Barbara had called her after she'd confided the story in Lori. She'd told her to come home and spend the week of Christmas and New Years away from California, away from her home where Lindsey had spent the better part of 1997, and remember that there were still people who loved her no matter what.

"Come and eat good food, make cookies with me and Jessi, watch the March Of The Wooden Soldiers with your dad...just be at home for once and forget that whole life even exists," Barbara suggested to her over the phone.

"I don't know, Mom," Stevie said, trying not to let her mother hear her cry. "The last time I was with you guys, Lindsey was there." She left out the fact that she had been pregnant on their trip to Arizona for the Fourth of July, although she hadn't known it yet. 

"You're going to be okay, Teedee," Barbara assured her. "This is a good start."

In the end, she had agreed to the trip. Now, alone in her bedroom on Christmas Eve, wearing green silk pajamas for the holiday, her hair freshly washed and dried, no makeup on her face, she wandered over to the stereo in her bedroom and selected the album Blue by Joni Mitchell on CD. She thought with a gasp of the baby she would never get to hold as her eyes passed over the track listing and she saw "Little Green", the song she'd sung to her baby in the bathtub one night that seemed a million years ago, Lindsey peeking through the door and marveling at the beauty of the scene and thinking she didn't know he was watching her and falling in love with her more with every minute of the song. She used the button on the stereo to advance the track until she found what she was looking for, and the bedroom became filled with the familiar notes of Joni Mitchell's "Jingle Bells" refrain on the piano at the beginning of "River". Stevie flopped down onto her turned-down bed and began to sing softly along.

"It's coming on Christmas, they're cutting down trees, they're putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace; I wish I had a river I could skate away on...But it don't snow here; it stays pretty green. I'm gonna make a lot of money, then I'm gonna quit this crazy scene; I wish I had a river I could skate away on..."

Stevie remembered playing this song in December of 1971, about a week before Christmas, she and Lindsey in their tiny apartment in Los Angeles just a few months and Stevie missing her mom that holiday season so much she could barely breathe. Blue was a flawless album, she'd told him when she'd brought it home, and he'd watched her sit for hours with the lyrics sheet and a joint in her hand on the floor, memorizing Joni's work and taking it into herself. She remembered how he'd pulled her into his lap, tossing a guitar aside to hold her there, while she'd sang "A Case Of You" to him along with the record and giggled as he'd nuzzled her neck and kissed it softly while she'd sung to him, "'Cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time..."  And she remembered when they'd argued not too long later over money and how she'd asked him to be more careful with it once she brought it home, thinking of the same song when Joni sang, "Go to him, stay with him if you can, but be prepared to bleed." Over two decades later, she still thought that line was a truer representation of their love than she or any other person in Fleetwood Mac had ever sung.