Buckingham Nicks A/U Series Part 7: Say You Will

For All The Love I Have For Your Life (Part Two)

Santa Monica, California
Friday, October 4, 2002
(11:00 pm)
********************

"It's the one where they can't find the car in the parking garage. Come watch with me."

Lindsey was already settled in bed, and he had found the nightly rerun of Seinfeld on TV. Stevie had disappeared into the bathroom when the kids had gone home after a second evening in a row - the first being Lindsey's birthday dinner and cake the night before - and he knew she spent a lot of time there at night, applying various creams and products and doing certain beauty rituals, but he was beginning to worry. The door was closed, which it seldom was unless she was doing something in the bathroom that required privacy, and he called out to the closed door, "Stevie? You good in there? Did you fall in?"

Behind the bathroom door, Stevie stood naked in the mirror. She had her pajamas on the nearby vanity, ready to put on, but she was taking a moment to study her body up close. She had to admit, at age fifty-four and having had four children, it could have been a lot worse. There were various stretch marks and some loose skin in places where babies had grown, her breasts - almost ten years natural now after having her broken implants drained in 1994 - hung a bit lower these days but still looked great in her clothes...and out of them, according to Lindsey, who still paid them plenty of attention.

She thought back to the sleepy early morning lovemaking that had started off their day, and of the birthday sex the night before, when Lindsey had sung her "Your Body Is A Wonderland" by John Mayer and made her giggle as he proved it by covering every inch of her body with kisses. No matter what problems they'd faced throughout the thirty-two years since they'd become a couple - and they'd had plenty - sex had always been the one thing between them that had never suffered. She thought of the rainy afternoon at home when they'd conceived Amber, the long, romantic nights making love by the fire in Aspen, the hurried sex in backstage dressing rooms in their youth and the thousands of hotel rooms on tour that had always felt like home the moment they laid down together in the dark, their wedding night when she was pregnant with Julia and he'd turned her self-consciousness over her size into making her feel like a princess, all of the times he'd called her dirty girl and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming, all of the times he'd looked into her eyes as he sank deeper and deeper into her and whispered, "My beautiful Stephanie." She thought of him tripping over her discarded boots on the floor of her room at the Tropicana Motel on his way back to bed the first night they'd shared together, and then their first night in Los Angeles barely a year later when he'd watched her dancing around in babydoll pajamas with Ginny the dog in her arms to "Tighter And Tighter" until they were engaged in a tickle fight that had ended in her surrender before he'd pulled her down to their mattress on the floor and told her that if living together meant he got to feel her body beside his every night, he never intended to move again for the rest of his life.

There were tears in her eyes after awhile, and by the time she'd taken a few deep breaths and gotten them under control, she had also dressed for bed, choosing a simple black silk nightgown that came up well above the knee and was trimmed in pink lace. She took one last look at herself in the mirror above the sink, her hand over her lower stomach as she contemplated the fact that what lie beneath the black silk could very well be her undoing. Ovarian cancer. Waiting in the office for Richard earlier that day, she had nervously read through pamphlets and found that studies had shown that having children reduced a woman's risk of breast cancer, but increased her risk of reproductive cancers in middle age. It seemed like a double-edged sword, one that ended in a woman being doomed regardless of her life choices, and as she considered the fact that she'd had four children - at thirty, at thirty-one, at forty and, surprisingly at forty-nine, she thought of her four babies who certainly weren't babies anymore and wondered how she would even begin to broach the subject of her health if the biopsy revealed she was sick. She felt betrayed by her own body, the body that had housed and nourished four amazing human beings that were perfect combinations of herself and Lindsey - true Buckingham Nicks collaborations all - and it took all her might not to just burst into tears and confess it all to Lindsey, tell him what Richard had told her and crawl into his arms and stay there until Monday when she found out her fate.