Stand Back (Mirage Era: Part 3)

No One Knows How I Feel

Marina Del Rey
Monday, December 20, 1982
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"It's coming on Christmas, they're cutting down trees, they're putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace...Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on..."

Stevie was upstairs in the jungle-themed nursery, sitting in the Bentwood rocking chair and holding Matthew in her arms and singing him to sleep to her beloved Joni Mitchell. She'd been singing him Joni Mitchell songs almost since his first day home from the premature baby ward at the hospital, and it had become a fail-safe way of getting him to sleep. She knew she shouldn't have let the tape of the Blue album play past "This Flight Tonight" but she had...and the song that had come up next was "River". She hadn't been able to even think of this song without crying in a two weeks...not since she had broken the news to Lindsey that she and Kim were getting married. There were tears in her eyes as she sang the familiar lyrics to the ten-week-old baby boy in her arms, and she was amazed at how quickly tears of sadness at her first Christmas season without Robin had turned to tears of guilt and despair because she'd broken Lindsey's heart and left him for another man...again.

"I made my baby cry..." she sang, wondering how the hell Joni Mitchell's music had become the story of her life this past year. "He tried hard to help me, you know, he put me at ease, and he loved me so naughty, made me weak in the knees; oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on...I'm so hard to handle,I'm selfish and I'm sad; now I've gone and lost the best baby that I ever had; oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on..."

Lindsey had looked so peaceful that last night, lying beside her in bed asleep after they'd made love, Stevie crying the entire time on the second round because she knew she had to tell him and she knew he would be blindsided, almost as blindsided as Kim had been when she'd sat downstairs in his living room two weeks ago, the living room that once upon a time Robin had decorated with love and care for the beginning of their life together in their new home, and told him that they should just get married, that it was the best thing to do considering the circumstances...

"I'm here every day, most nights...and believe me, that's great because I'm done sleeping in the damn closet," she'd told Kim that night on the couch, where he'd been working his way through a case of beer and she'd sat and wondered how long she had to explain it to him before she could sneak off upstairs and do more cocaine...it had been about two hours now and she was feeling terrible, shaky and hollow without it...or maybe that was because of how terrified she was of the words coming out of her mouth.

"What the hell are you doing sleeping in the closet?" Kim asked, his face scrunching up in confusion.

"It's a long story...trust me, you wouldn't understand." He didn't need to know she heard noises in her house, her beautiful dream house in Venice Beach she'd worked so hard to make perfect...and now it was haunted and she was terrified and she wished she could have Lindsey's arms around her permanently so the monsters wouldn't come after her.

"Well listen, Stevie...I know it sounds insane, but...I don't know...I see you with the baby up there in the nursery sometimes, and...I just can't believe how much of Robin I see in you." Kim's hand had fallen upon and was resting on her thigh, her legs curled beneath her on the brown velvet sofa she had helped Robin pick out two years ago, shortly after they'd all gotten home from the Tusk tour exhausted and Robin had begun to decorate the new house.

"Robin and I weren't alike at all, Kim; you're seeing things." They couldn't have been more opposite - Robin was a stately brunette, sometimes a redhead. She was a neat freak. She was an early riser. She was grounded, almost to a fault. Stevie was none of these things.