I Will Run To You

Will You Please Make Up Your Mind (Part 1)

Buffalo, New York
Saturday, July 2, 1983
(9:30 am)
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The baby dreams had returned.

This time, they were more horrifying than ever.

Stevie was thrashing around in her bed so violently that she woke herself up. It took her a full minute to ascertain that she was, in fact, in a hotel room in Buffalo, New York and not where she had been in her dream, locked in a room that was getting smaller and smaller because dropping from the ceiling were what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of baby boys, all of them crying, but her arms were pinned to her sides from the sheer volume of babies in every direction and she could do nothing to stop them from crying. She tried screaming for help, what came out of her mouth was a baby's cry to match the ones around her.

She was a baby. She was helpless. She was staring directly into the eyes of her stalker, but that was all she could see of his face.

It was the sound of the phone ringing beside her bed that broke into her thoughts and snapped her back to reality. She was still shaking when she picked up the phone, barely able to hold the receiver in her trembling hand. "Hello."

"Hey there, kiddo! I'm not waking you up, am I?" Stevie was almost relieved to hear her father's voice.

"No...no, I'm up," she lied, reaching across the bed to the small mirror topped with cocaine by her bedside. She decided to wait for her hands to stop shaking before cutting herself a line. "Happy birthday, Daddy! I'm dedicating 'Landslide' to you tonight."

"Thanks," said Jess. "That's all the present I need."

"Well that's just crazy talk; just wait until you check out your real presents!" Stevie had a new set of golf clubs and a complete set of 78-rpm Frank Sinatra albums festively wrapped and waiting for him to open at his birthday dinner that night.

"You're too generous, Stevie." Jess cleared his throat. "So look here, I'll let you go and do your thing. Just calling to pass on two pieces of information to you before you start your day. First off, your mom's coming in today so we can all be together for dinner tonight."

"Oh, good! I was hoping she'd be able to get here," Stevie said. Her nightmare was beginning to fade. Steadier of hand now, she cut a large line of cocaine and snorted half in each nostril, quietly enough for Jess not to hear. "What's the other thing?"

"I've invited someone else to join us for dinner tonight," Jess announced. "So we'll be six. Hope that doesn't mess up any reservations you've made."

"No, no, the more the merrier, Daddy! It's your birthday, after all. Who's coming? A friend of yours?"

"In a manner of speaking." Jess' pause was broken with, "It's Lindsey, honey."

Stevie felt all of the color drain from her face. The cocaine had not kicked in yet and she was starting to tremble again. It took awhile before she felt courageous enough to not let him hear her voice shake as she said, "Lindsey? Buckingham? Daddy...are you kidding me? What the hell is Lindsey doing in Upstate New York?"

"He called the house a few nights ago to say an early happy birthday to me and ask how you were doing," Jess explained. "One thing led to another and he wrangled himself an invitation."

"Just an invitation would've been just fine," Stevie thought, wishing she could set aside her anger and terror long enough to laugh at the thought of her own poignant lyric. "You could have asked me first, you know! What made you think I'd be okay with Lindsey coming with us?"

"It was an out-of-the-blue thing, kid. What can I say? It's my birthday, for God sakes, and you only live once...and I invited Lindsey to come out with us tonight." Sitting in his room two floors down, Jess was keeping his story straight despite the fact that his invitation to Lindsey had been a great deal more planned than he let on. He was not about to get into the marathon phone conversation he and Barbara had had with Lindsey the week before, the worry in all of their voices as they discussed the fact that Stevie's stalker had been able to send two more letters and a giant teddy bear to her hotels last month, as well as the fact that none of them had seen her sober in about as long. All Stevie needed to know, he thought, was that Lindsey was going to be around to celebrate the birthday of the man he'd considered his second father for over a decade.