Everybody Loves You

No Voice Of A Stranger Could Play That Part (Stevie's Story)

Malibu, California
Monday, January 9, 2023
(3:30 pm)
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Lindsey told me the morning of my mother's funeral that it was going to be easy to pick an outfit for the event because everything I owned was black.

I laughed until I cried, and he hugged me and kissed me and together we picked out an outfit for me to wear to the funeral. I looked like Stevie Nicks in it, but I felt more like a little girl lost in the department store crying in the corner near housewares because she'd become separated from her mommy.

Lindsey flew all night to get to Phoenix on December 28, 2011, when I called him and told him Barbara was gone. He just packed a bag and booked a flight, told Kristen he'd be gone a few days and...there he was. One minute I was crying alone with Sulamith in my brother's guest room, and the next Lindsey was holding me, lying beside me in the dark and promising me I'd never be alone. I cried like a little girl and even balled up two fists but he never left my side. He let me cry in his arms until I tired myself out, and he sang "Crystal" until both the dog and I fell asleep. The next day he stayed close to me as I spoke to pretty much every person I'd ever met while circulating a somber room in a black blazer, and the day after that, in the pouring rain - which was rare for Arizona and someone said was good luck because God was crying or some kind of nonsense - he held my hand as I stood in front of an open hole in the wet ground next to my father's grave and listened as some guy in a collar talked all about the amazing person Barbara Nicks was and many lives she'd touched in eighty-four years.

Later on, as I stood by myself outside on the deck out back in the house that was about to be vacant for the first time since 1973, I was smoking a cigarette - something I hadn't done since I quit on New Years Eve 1996 as a resolution - and thinking of the "lives she touched" part of funeral speeches. It got me to thinking about one of the best songs Joni Mitchell ever wrote, "A Case Of You". It's the second-to-last track on Blue. I had one part in particular on my mind.

"I remember that time you told me, you said, 'Love is touching souls.' Surely you touched mine, 'cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time."

It made me think about "touching people's lives" and whether or not I ever had. I used to tell my mother that was all I ever wanted to do with my music. Touch people. Then I started thinking of who had touched me in my life. My parents had, obviously. Christopher. Robin. Lindsey. Mick. Joe. Matthew. Jessi. Tom. I had a lot of people in my life who'd "touched" me and I guess I'd done the same for them. But Joni was singing specifically about touching souls, and I was on my second cigarette and really starting to get into the weeds there in my head about it all when I felt someone literally touching me, on my shoulder. I looked back, tossing my cigarette away in a panic.

It was Lindsey.

He had a gentle smile on his face and a glass of wine for me in his hand, and he told me to drink enough to fall asleep that night but not so much that I lost myself in thoughts that kept me awake.

What can I say? He's known me all my life. He knew exactly what I was capable of. He had also been sleeping beside since he'd been in Phoenix and we'd made love the night before, some time in the middle of the night when he'd woken up to my crying and I'd begged him to give me something besides grief to feel for a change, just as he had when Robin was dying and we were in France making Mirage and he'd spent every night alternating between holding me after a nightmare and touching me everywhere a person could possibly be touched until my tears were of love and pleasure instead of heart-wrenching loss and pain.

"I have to go home tomorrow," he announced to me on the deck that evening as we stood outside watching it get dark at five because it was winter.

"I'll be okay," I said, lying out of my ass. I was a wreck. I was broken. I felt it. My last rock had crumbled and all I could foresee was a mudslide. I had no idea how I was going to go on.

Knowing me too well, he pulled me into his arms and I tried not to stain his good button-down shirt with mascara tears. He rocked me in his arms and whispered that he would hold me all night if I wanted him to, and I refused to see what we were doing as wrong. That night we'd shared while he was recording "Soldier's Angel" with me the year before was the first time we'd taken it all the way since I'd pretty much pushed him out the door towards Kristen and the baby she was carrying, and our night in my brother's house was the second. I was too wrapped up in my own pain to even think about him as another woman's husband, as someone's father. He was Lindsey. He was mine. He loved Barbara and missed her too. We literally clung to each other until Christopher drove him to the airport the next morning, New Years Eve, in the rain.

I looked down at the basic black pantsuit I was wearing to Christine's memorial service that afternoon and almost laughed out loud, remembering Lindsey's comment from over a decade before to try and cheer me up. I'd added a long gray scarf to break up the black, but as I passed by the mirrors in the hallway near the restrooms at the Little Beach House, the venue where the service was being held, I didn't just see Stevie Nicks in black. I saw myself for real.

My age was starting to show. I'd looked forty at sixty and told Oprah Winfrey all about my secret to good skin. But I was seventy-four now, and quite frankly, I blamed the pandemic. Locked up for two years and doing nothing but teaching Lily to shake hands and drawing pictures of angels and yelling at CNN about abortion rights and Vladimir Putin had taken a toll on me. I looked tired. I looked lost. I looked like my grandma did shortly before she died. It scared the shit out of me...but not as much as what happened next.

"Hi, stranger."

He was wearing his uniform - jeans, black v-neck tee, boots, leather jacket. His hair was grayer. His skin was still tan. He was visibly thinner. He looked tired. He looked older. He looked a little bit broken. He was smiling just a little.

His eyes seemed even bluer than I remembered, though, and I had to hurry up and divert my own eyes from his or I was going to be in trouble. I began walking over to the man I hadn't seen in five years who once upon a time had been the love of my life.

"Hi, Linds."

I managed to keep my trembling under control, thank God, because after I smiled back, he pulled me into a hug.

I suddenly had no idea what the hell he'd ever done to make me so angry with him.

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