Buckingham Nick A/U Series Part 5: The Dance, Continued...

Never Going Back Again

Boston, Massachusetts
Friday, September 20, 1997
(4:00 pm)
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"It's about a girl who makes her way to the top by sleeping around, but there's one man she loves and can never have."

Stevie was sitting up in bed, propped up against the pillows, reading a book and following doctors' orders to rest every single minute she wasn't on stage. There had been tears yesterday, and some impassioned shouting, but an agreement had been reached. Fleetwood Mac would go on with the tour, but every minute Stevie was not singing, she was to be in bed, and if anything started to feel unusual in any way, she was not to keep it to herself. Lindsey had insisted on that, tears in his eyes last night, holding onto her in bed as if she were dying and explaining how powerless he felt when he'd walked into the bathroom at the arena in Connecticut and seen her on the floor.

"You don't know what it was like for me to see my wife lying there in a heap on the floor," he was saying as he cried. "I didn't know what to think, what to do...like years ago when you weren't well...I saw you like that and my whole life flashed in front of me...OUR life, Stevie...and I'm not done with it yet!"

Stevie was crying now too, and she mushed herself right into his chest as he held her tight and said, "We're not done yet, baby...we have years ahead of us, and a brand new little person to love and take care of and keep safe...and we will, Lindsey, I promise...it's going to be okay. This is not how we're going down...okay?"

Not quite sure who needed to comfort whom - or if it really mattered either way because they'd been one soul for so long, they cried and kissed and rocked each other to sleep after their long, painful night in the ER, and woke up just in time to make the drive to Massachusetts for the next show, until which time Stevie had to remain in bed.

Sitting on the sofa near the window on their five-star Boston hotel room, Lindsey looked over the guitar on his lap and smiled at his wife's description of the plot of the enormous book she was reading. "Sounds like a Hollywood story," he said. He began to pick a few chords, and Stevie heard the beginning of "Never Going Back Again".

"I know, right?" She tossed her bookmark into Forever Amber and placed the book down beside her. "I was reading it over the Fourth of July trip in Arizona, but then Julia's accident happened and we had the barbecue and I started packing for tour...and I neglected it. It's damn good." She listened for a moment to the song Lindsey had written over twenty years before, when their relationship was in grave danger and they were both flirting with leaving for someone else, until, according to Lindsey, she "broke down and let him in." She said, after awhile, "This book is like the life you saved me from when you wrote that song - living a life from man to man and getting more and more money and more and more power...but not having what I wanted most in the world."

Lindsey looked across the room to where Stevie, in a pair of shorts and his Rolling Stones t-shirt "for good vibes", she'd said, was sitting cross-legged against the pillows among the rumpled comforter, her hand on the baby, her wedding rings shining in the afternoon sun coming in from the windows. The crying and the fighting of the last two days behind them, all he could see coming out of her eyes was love. He waited for the correct place to come around on the guitar and began to sing.

"She broke down and let me in..." He gave her a knowing grin on that first line. "Made me miss it where I've been...Been down one time, been down two times...I'm never going back again..."

They'd canceled the first of their two shows in Boston, promising to return, and tonight, they were getting back on stage. Stevie had been warned to keep the theatrics to a minimum on stage, and she'd joked that at least it wasn't one of her solo shows in which she'd have to twirl during "Stand Back". She was to sit down whenever she was not needed onstage, and she was to be in bed as soon as each show was over. "Far cry from the nights on the first tour when they made us Fleetwood Mac kneepads to keep us comfy around the cocaine table after a show!" she'd joked to Christine, who had burst out laughing and hugged her and told her she had to keep her bun in the oven until Christmas so she should do whatever it took.