Everybody Loves You

It Heals Her Heart (Stevie's Story)

Malibu, California
Monday, January 9, 2023
(4:00 pm)
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Lindsey once told me he thought I'd be the last to leave.

We were sitting in the backyard my brother's house in Phoenix, it had been 2012 for about an hour, and we were sharing a much-needed joint and looking up at the stars in the sky and not saying much. I was trying to figure out which one of the stars was my mother. She'd been gone three days and it was just beginning to sink in.

"What do you mean?" I asked, taking the joint from his fingers into mine. I inhaled and hoped the pot would put me to sleep. I was okay, though, because if pot failed me, my insomnia would be cured the moment my head hit the pillow and I felt his arms wrap around me under the covers. Christopher had seen us emerging from the same bedroom two mornings in a row now so he knew damn well what was going on. He hadn't said a word.

"I mean your firefly song." Lindsey took back the joint and took a hit, then another. "You'll be the last to leave, the last to be gone. You're going to live forever, angel. You're too strong to go down."

"I don't feel very strong," I told him, ignoring the little voice in my head that had heard him say I'd live forever that normally would have made me shout out the song, "Fame! I'm gonna live forever! I'm gonna learn how to fly!" I wasn't in a theatrical mood.

"I wouldn't imagine you do right now," he said. "But you are. You've lived through plenty, Stevie. You'll live through this too."

I took a long hit of pot and on my exhale, I said, "She was the last of the old guard, Linds. We're the old people now. I told Chris that yesterday when people all started to go home...we're it now. We're the older generation."

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Lindsey put out the joint and we didn't say anything; I was mulling over his comment about "Fireflies" and he knew to let me. Finally, I said, "You really think that of me, Lindsey?"

"That you're strong?" He leaned in towards me on the deck chair he sat in. "Of course I do!"

"No...I mean...about being the last to leave. The last to be gone. What makes you think that?"

Lindsey's face grew serious then, almost severe. "I didn't used to," he confessed. "There was a time about ten years ago when I used to panic every time the phone rang...you were on a lot of medication and you were...well, you weren't you. I used to think maybe you'd be the first to go...and I'd answer the phone and just pray it wasn't Karen or someone telling me..." He stopped talking, looking down at his lap. When he looked back up at me, I saw tears in his eyes. He said, "You're going to survive this, you know. If you could survive that, you could survive anything."

I had not planned on crying any more that night. I'd been crying for days and it had given me a permanent headache and the face of a woman twenty years older than I was. But Lindsey's words of assurance - and the tears he was trying to hide as he spoke - made me crumble.

"I'm getting pretty fucking tired of surviving shit," I said, starting to cry. "To be the last to leave...the last to be gone..." My lyrics, like always, were coming back to haunt me. "My mother was that...it's hard, Linds. It's really hard. One day you're surrounded by people and you just need ten minutes to yourself alone...and the next you're out in the yard thinking about how everyone else is gone and all you have are boxes of photo albums of people and pets who you'd give anything to see one more time because those days with them were the days you were actually living."

Lindsey reached across the few inches of distance between the two deck chairs then and held me. I cried for awhile, wondering how something as simple as his fingers in my hair could make everything seem not so awful anymore.

I knew he'd inevitably tell me it was time to go upstairs to bed. He did.

I knew he'd hold me in bed that night as he had every night since he'd arrived in Phoenix. He did.

I knew we'd be making love again within minutes of being in bed together. We did.

I knew he was another woman's husband now but I also knew it was only by default because he'd had to be pushed into it by me, and that somehow it wasn't cheating when it was us. It was.

But my mother was dead and I was not okay and we needed to comfort each other the best way we knew how. So we did.

Flash forward eleven years and another link to my past, another in the line of strong women I've known for so long I'd forgotten how to live without them, was gone. I felt like I was watching the whole thing through a hazy lens, like a dream sequence on a soap opera from the 1980s, as Mick got up to the podium to begin his eulogy for Christine. I watched John two seats down, sucking in his breath. I felt Lindsey's hand tighten around mine.

I thought of that conversation in my brother's backyard on New Years Eve 2011 and wondered if this whole thing was going to be history repeating itself.

"I wrote this for Chris right after she passed away," Mick was saying to us all when my brain came back to the moment and I began to listen to a man who'd known Chris since 1968 - the same amount of time I'd known Lindsey - give a speech in her memory.

"For Chris..." he went on, looking down at his papers out of small glasses that made him look kind of like a rock and roll Santa. "This is a day where my dear, sweet friend Christine McVie has taken flight and left us Earthbound folks to listen with bated breath to the sounds of that song bird, reminding one and all that love is all around us to reach for and touch in this precious life that is gifted. Part of my heart has flown away today...I will miss everything about you,
Christine McVie. Memories abound... they fly to me."

With my left hand, I was bunching up the tassels and the end of the gray scarf I was wearing. My right hand, without my even realizing it, was clutching Lindsey's. It was amazing to me...I mean, we hadn't seen each other in five years. The last time we had seen each other, I was screaming at him to get the fuck out - out of the room, out of the band, out of my life, out of my memories, out of my heart. It was Christine who had calmed me down, poured me a glass of tequila and told me I had every right to be angry, but I would make myself sick if I didn't figure out how to stop carrying on that way.

Then suddenly Mick was done and sitting next to me again and I didn't realize so much time had passed because Lindsey's hand was still in mine and he had begun to stroke the top of my hand with his thumb. Was it because I had silent tears running down my cheeks from what parts of Mick's beautiful speech I'd allowed myself to take in? Had he seen my tears and gone with the safe bet of stroking his thumb along my hand because five years of bitter silence between us had rendered it inappropriate for him to drape his arm around me over the back of the chairs like he would have before our last big showdown?

I didn't have the luxury of wondering about it much longer. It was John's turn to speak, and as he rose from his chair my eyes turned in that direction, and I watched Mick move quickly from patting his best friend encouragingly on the back to noticing whose hands were holding whose next to him.

His expression turned to stone, and I distinctly saw him roll his eyes.

He understood that whatever he'd been trying to accomplish on New Years Eve when he kissed me and told me he loved me was not going to happen...not as long as there was a Lindsey Buckingham around to hold my hand. It was the same Lindsey Buckingham who'd been by my side with every loss in my life - Robin, my father, my mother, Tom Petty, every dog who'd ever called me Mom. That's what he was to me, pure and simple.

Mick knew in that moment that he didn't stand a chance against something so strong, and as John stood up at the podium, clearing his throat and nervously shuffling a few pieces of yellow paper, my eyes were on Mick again.

Mick Fleetwood was six feet and six inches tall, but to me he'd never looked so small.

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