Say You Will Part 1: Destiny Rules

There's No Going Back On Plans We've Made

Pacific Coast Highway, California
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
5:00 pm
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"Well I bet you any amount of money, he'll be coming back to you...Ooh I know there ain't no doubt about it, sometimes life is funny...You think you're in your darkest hour, then the lights are coming on in the house of love..."

Kristen Buckingham was gleefully singing along to "House Of Love" by Amy Grant and Vince Gill on the car radio as she drove her minivan towards the Hollywood Hills to pick up her husband and children from the studio house. She loved this song; it had come out in 1994 but for some reason it had been on the radio a lot wherever she went in the summer of 1998, when Will was first born. She had a suddenly flash of herself singing along to it in her old car, Will sound asleep in his car seat behind her with a pacifier in his mouth, on her way to the Beverly Center to buy new pants because she still hadn't lost all of the pregnancy weight and she had nothing to wear. Today she was singing along alone in the car, and her thoughts turned to Thanksgiving tomorrow and to the fact that it was exactly five years ago today that she'd heard back from Lindsey after leaving an urgent message at his hotel in New York City, telling him she was pregnant. She had not been surprised he hadn't answered the phone in his room when she'd first called him - Fleetwood Mac was performing at Madison Square Garden, and besides, he had most likely been in bed somewhere in the hotel with Stevie Nicks. Lindsey had tried so hard the entire time they were dating that fall to keep the Stevie stories to a minimum, God love him, but the poor guy was obsessed. Every other word out of his mouth was about Stevie - how she still did such a great job singing "Landslide", how she loved "Bleed To Love Her" and told him he needed to record a studio version, how she wore those capes and top hats in the first place because she was so tiny, how her mother was the kindest soul to walk the face of the earth. Kristen had decided one night during that time that her mission was to love Lindsey and give him all of the things that he'd apparently missed out on by following that ridiculous twirling elf around the planet for twenty-five years until he crossed over to her side.

She knew after five years of trying that she had not succeeded...yet.

Everyone around her, including her own mother, had assumed that she'd gotten pregnant with Will on purpose to take Lindsey away from Stevie, and they were not wrong. She still marveled at how simple it had been - she'd simply tossed her birth control pill into the trash the night before she'd been with Lindsey and four weeks later, bingo! What really upset her, though, was how many people accused her of getting pregnant with LeeLee on purpose to get Lindsey to marry her. Of course she had, but she still resented the implications of others because that meant that the people close to her who'd accused her of that didn't think that Lindsey would have ever married her on his own, even after two years and a son together! She'd done the same exact thing in 1999 - flushed her pill down the toilet, pried Lindsey away from the computer where he'd quickly closed out the window he'd been on - an article about Stevie on VH1 Storytellers - and taken him upstairs to bed. She'd had a sneaking suspicion he had been thinking about Stevie that night in bed; he'd done certain things that night that they didn't normally do, said things she'd never heard before. She could have been upset about it, but she was on a mission - and she'd succeeded. Four weeks later, two pink lines. Lindsey had looked like she'd told him he was being sentenced to twenty years of hard labor when she'd shown him the test, and that had been what upset her. Even his proposal had seemed forced, but again, Kristen pressed on - her mission to take him away from that silly old lady with the too-long stories and the stupid capes was working...kind of.

He was with her today, listening to a few of the final mixes of the songs on Say You Will before they broke for the four-day weekend. Sometimes, when she let her mind wander a little too far, she considered the idea that they were up to more than making music together. She could just tell in the way Lindsey said the name Stevie, even, that he still loved her. The question, of course, was whether or not Stevie still loved him...but then again, what was that stupid song Lindsey had made her listen to about a year ago on that album with that dumb fairy-looking cover, the one where she sang something about fingertips and soft lips or something? "Love Is". That was it. "Love is watching you go." Okay then, I guess that was her answer. Stevie had loved him and let him go. Well good! About damn time! She'd been hanging onto him since 1970 - the year Kristen was born, for God sake! Time to let someone else have a turn.