The Dance A/U Part 1: Crash Into Me

In Your Eyes, Love, It Grows So

***Dear Buckingham Nicks Fans,

Since this is The Dance in a what-if-it-ended-differently universe, there's bound to be a mixture of sexy stuff, romance and angst...and believe me...angst awaits if you read through the taping of the concert...

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Warner Brothers Studio,

Burbank, California

May 23, 1997

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"This is for you, Daddy."

Jess Nicks had heard "Landslide" for the first time in 1973, when Stevie and Lindsey had come home for Christmas and Barbara had warned him not to mention the Aspen debacle, the failed Everly Brothers tour that had resulted in Lindsey leaving Aspen in a huff and leaving Stevie behind with strep throat, Ginny the dog, a broken-down Toyota and only forty bucks to her name. She had called them desperate, coughing and in tears and begging for money to get herself and her little dog back to California, "Landslide" born of her close look at her life, which wasn't working, and wondering if Jess and Barbara were right and she should say goodbye to Lindsey and her music career and come home to finish up her college credits and become an English teacher who did music on the side as a hobby. Jess had always believed "Landslide" was about him, and Stevie had never had the heart to correct him.

On a sound stage in Burbank, Lindsey behind her to her left as always, Stevie began singing "Landslide" for the audience. This was their third and final tape night, and The Dance was almost done. Lindsey was finger-picking the familiar chords as she began, "I took my love and I took it down...I climbed a mountain and I turned around...and I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills till the landslide brought me down...Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart rise above? Can I sail through the changing ocean tides, can I handle the seasons of my life? Mmm-mm, I don't know..."

Sometimes, when Stevie sang "Landslide", she tried to answer her own questions in her head. What is love? she asked herself that night. Love, she had decided, was a middle-aged guitarist with dark, curly hair that was just beginning to get salt-and-pepper gray in places, standing behind her and using the same hands to play a song she'd written years ago that he'd used only a few hours before to caress every inch of her body until the warmth and the pleasure had brought her to tears, before he'd head her close against his heart and whispered into her tousled hair, "You are the love of my life, Stephanie." Love was the way his arms around her every night kept the bad dreams away, how he'd brought box of Animal Crackers home to her last night to eat while they watched the episode of ER she'd taped while they were filming, her head on his lap, his fingers in her hair, feeling more at home than she had in twenty years.

Can the child within my heart rise above? She was turning forty-nine in three days, hardly a child, but she could still see Barbara's little Teedee sometimes, playing with Jessi's Barbies in her bedroom in Arizona, writing her hopes and dreams in her journal every night...but mostly she could hear her when Lindsey was making her laugh, tickling her or making silly jokes, and he told her he could listen to her little giggle for the rest of his life. Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life? She certainly hadn't sailed through the last twenty years, but she'd come out alive, and she was beginning to get the feeling that Lindsey wanted to share all of the seasons of her life with her again, the way he did once upon a time when she was not ready to sail through the difficult ocean tides with him as they grew more and more into a storm.

"Well I've been afraid changing, 'cause I've built my life around you...but time makes you bolder, children get older and I'm getting older too...So..."