Silver Springs: A Holiday Love Story

Time Casts A Spell On You

Santa Monica, California
Thanksgiving Day
November 24, 2022
(2:00 pm)
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Robin Buckingham remembered the day her mother had sat her down and told her they were selling the house in the Pacific Palisades.

It was 2014 and her parents were about to go off on tour again. Aunt Christine had just rejoined Fleetwood Mac after sixteen years - Robin's entire life up to that point - and although they'd been on tour for a year and her mother had spent the two years before that stomping across the United States and Australia milking In Your Dreams for all it was worth, she understood why they were going again.

In the early years, when she wasn't in school yet, Stevie had taken her along on tour - Robin had been in her lap on a plane all through Trouble In Shangri-La and she still remembered playing backstage with Rosie O'Donnell's son Parker and daughter Chelsea while her mother talked on live TV to Rosie about "Silver Springs" and The Dance. Parker and Chelsea reminded Robin of her brother Will and herself, and they had the coolest toys and Rosie had picked her up and spun her around until her dress flew in the air and called her Little Stevie Jr. Robin had never much minded her parents going off to record or tour or anything else.

It was selling the house that upset her.

"It's really silly to still have the house if you guys are big now and Daddy and I are always gone," her mother had explained to her. They were in the living room where her mother had made In Your Dreams with Dave Stewart a few years before, the fireplace was lit, and they were drinking tea and getting ready to watch Glee. "We're not going to do it until you're done with school and go to college, but I wanted to tell you now because Daddy and I talked seriously about it in our hotel room in Vegas after I cried like a jerk all the way through 'Say Goodbye' and the entire internet picked it up."

Robin had seen it all unfold on YouTube before her parents even flew home. Lindsey had made a grand speech about time passing and learning lessons and dedicated the song from Say You Will to Stevie and called her "the beautiful lady to my right" and they had sung the song with Stevie crying and unable to sing most of the way through. She'd been happy to see YouTube footage the next day of Stevie smiling happily, top hat on in true Stevie Nicks fashion, singing "Old Lang Syne" with the band on New Years Eve at midnight during the next show at the MGM Grand.

"Why were you so emotional about the song, Mom?" Robin asked. "It's about years ago...you and Daddy were broken up and all when he wrote it but you're fine now." She knew her parents loved each other. Their bedroom door had been locked every Sunday morning of her life, they sat almost in each other's laps to watch TV at night when they were home, and there was something in the way her dad called her mom Stephanie that was so intimate that it made Robin curious, made her wonder if any of the boys she'd ever liked at school would ever look at her and say "Robin" in the way her dad lit up when he called her mother by her real first name.

"Oh, jeez, Robin, that's not it!" Her mother laughed. "My God, Daddy and I love each other so much it makes people sick!" Stevie had a far-away look on her face for a moment before returning to earth and looking at her daughter seriously. "We're all getting older, you know...I mean, it should have been LANDSLIDE making me cry over this...but it was your dad's song that did it. Times are changing, Robin. You're getting older and you have your own life...and you are stronger than you know!" Robin laughed at her mother's inability not to quote her own lyrics in conversation at every turn. "Will spends more time at home in Calabasas and his mom is thinking of moving them all to Brentwood...Daddy and I are two hundred years old now and it's a lot of house...some mornings I just want to get from my bed to my coffee maker without having to charter a plane! We have to say goodbye to the old days, honey. And it's sad as all hell because those days were special...so I cried."

"Hey Mom..." Robin giggled just the same as her mother always did and said, "Time makes you bolder."

Stevie smiled. "It sure does, kid."

Robin replayed the entire conversation from that day in her head on the drive to Santa Monica, listening to Mariah Carey sing "All I Want For Christmas Is You" on the radio and remembering how her grandmother Barbara used to love that song. Barbara had been sitting right next to her in the movie theater just after her sixth birthday when they'd gone with Stevie to see Love Actually and she'd seen school-aged children put on a Christmas concert in the film and a little girl had sung that song. Robin had decided that day, watching the girl of about ten sing that song on the screen, that she was going to grow up and sing like her parents did.

Part of her was afraid of walking into her parents' apartment that afternoon. The argument they'd had last night - no, the fight - had shaken her to her core. Will had taken her to the Third Avenue Promenade afterwards to a bar serving cheap draft beer and playing Post Malone songs while other Gen Z people like them were home for the holiday weekend and hanging out with old high school friends, and they'd done shots of Jamison and talked about their father's health problems and what made Stevie take everything so personally in her old age. She was a bit hung over today, she had to admit, and she wondered how Will was doing.

Kids at school used to pepper her with questions about why she had a brother her own age but wasn't a fraternal twin. They did not go to the same school or even live in the same neighborhood, but Robin had inherited her mother's gift for gab and loved telling stories to anyone who'd listen, and her brother Will featured prominently in all of her coolest stories. When she was older and her parents had told her the story - Lindsey's brief relationship with Kristen before reuniting with Stevie resulting in a baby, Kristen's psychotic break during the 1997 tour while her mother was pregnant with her - she had come away with a lot more understanding of how her family worked, such as the way Will was so protective of his mom but looked to Stevie for guidance instead, why he idolized their father, and why her parents always snuck the lyrics to "Silver Springs" into conversation before they kissed. It all began to make sense.

Her father's heart was failing and he was being obstinate about fixing it. Her mother was terrified of losing the other half of her own heart if he died. Will was trying to pretend it wasn't happening and Robin had no idea whose side to be on. Sometimes she envied Will his other family - a mother who lived to create perfect home interiors and was always looked just vacant enough not to get too involved, a stepfather who was so hands-off he could get away with anything, and two sisters who were so bonded together that they left him alone. At Will's other house, there wasn't a constant stream of musicians shouting about the same two chord progressions and mixing martinis, no parents who worked hard and loved hard and told never-ending stories about the past which were so cool she knew she'd been born too late.

But then, she'd always think, there would be no constant singing, no crazy little dogs running around, no big, loud dinners filled with crazy characters and hilarious anecdotes from the 1970s by people who let her sneak a few puffs of weed while both parents looked the other way because one spent the 1980s on cocaine and one locked himself up with medical grade marijuana every night in his studio. There would be no constant hugs from a tiny blonde woman in black who called her baby girl, no awesome dad picking her up in a Mercedes with a leather jacket and shades even in his seventies, no Aunt Christine to teach her piano or Uncle Mick putting a red top hat on her when she was six and handing her a set of sticks and telling her to beat it all out and nothing would ever be that wrong.

She pulled into the parking structure as Wham! was singing "Last Christmas" on the radio. She turned off the car, sighed once before grabbing her purse and the bottles of wine she'd promised to bring, and began her trip up to the penthouse floor where her father was sick and her mother was pretending she wasn't losing it and the who thing scared the shit out of her because she wasn't ready for the incredible life she'd been given by both of them so far to end.

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