Everybody Loves You

Epilogue: Stevie's Story

Maui, Hawaii
Valentine's Day ❤️
February 14, 2023
(11:45 pm)
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When I first started writing "Gypsy", I was telling the story of wistfully thinking back to the old days, those years before Fleetwood Mac and money and fancy things when I couldn't afford the clothing that was for sale at The Velvet Underground. It was supposed to be a song about longing for the peace of those days and trying to achieve it again by putting my mattress on the floor.

Then Robin told me she had leukemia.

Then Robin told me she was pregnant.

Then Robin told me she wasn't taking chemo anymore.

"Gypsy" changed over those two years I spent working on it, secretly tucking songs away in the gothic trunk for my own album, but it wasn't until we started making Mirage that I felt comfortable playing "Gypsy" out loud, offering it up to The Mac as my contribution while I sat upstairs in my room every night obsessively writing The Wild Heart. I had trouble getting through the song on stage that entire fall while we were touring, singing about how "lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice." That line is about how once in a lifetime you meet someone who gets you on the deepest level, who is family even though they're not, and if they leave, you'll probably never have that connection again.

The "maybe twice" part was because there had been a Robin, but there would always be a Lindsey.

I was standing in the bathroom of the bungalow on the beach in Maui where, the first time in fifty-two years, Lindsey and I were about to share a bed as a married couple. I had begun to think in the shower about how Lindsey and I had reunited because we'd lost Christine, how the last time had been because he'd comforted me when Tom died, and I'd traced all of the times we'd shared a bed in the last four decades since our original breakup - you know, the "Go Your Own Way" and "Dreams" one - back to grief and loss. It all seemed to come down to Lindsey holding me as I cried over someone's death, telling me I wasn't alone, and before we knew it we were all over each other in bed and he was calling me sweet girl and the words I love you were woven in between the moans and the whimpers and the sighs.

The only thing was that when it was over, we'd resume our lives. The fact that after Christine's death our night of passion from grief had stuck was a miracle, and most likely due to the fact that after all these years, we were tired of the cycle. We'd both given up the ghost and realized that we were not forty years old here; losing Christine hit close enough to home to remind us that if we wanted to be together, we did not have all the time in the world to do it anymore.

"I'm getting lonely out here all by myself, Mrs.  Buckingham," I heard Lindsey call out to me from the bedroom, and I couldn't help but smile. I took one last look at myself in the mirror above the sink, pleased with what I saw. I was almost seventy-five years old, and I felt kind of silly standing there in the little white silk nightgown I'd dug out of an old dresser drawer just for Lindsey - the one he'd loved so much on me in the Nineties, when we made "Twisted" together and fell in love again. I'd put it on to surprise him that night, but I did feel sort of silly suddenly, at my age, dressed for a wedding night.

"Hold your horses, Mr. Buckingham," I yelled back through the half-open door. "Beauty takes time."

"You've been beautiful for seventy-four years, Stephanie. No need to overdo it now."

I had to suck in a breath to keep from crying. I don't know how he did it, but Lindsey always made me feel beautiful. No matter what the state of our relationship over the years, I had never once doubted that in his eyes, I was the most beautiful woman in the world. I took another breath and said, "Okay then, sweetheart...ready for your wife to come out?"