I Will Run To You

Epilogue: I Will Run To You

Santa Monica, California
Monday, October 28, 2022
(12:30 am)
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"You're never going to guess in a million years who's on the Stephen Colbert show tonight, Mrs. Buckingham."

Lindsey sat up in bed at the apartment in Santa Monica where they had lived since Stevie had spent the entire early 2000s on the road in an effort to keep the music alive despite internet piracy she believed was killing the industry. He had his reading glasses at the tip of his nose, studying the labels of the three prescription bottles he held in his hand and cursing the fact that he was seventy-three and had a bad heart. Stevie turned out the light in the bathroom and sauntered over to the bed, where her husband sat with their two little Chinese crested dogs, Lily and Luna, and affixed her hands to the hips of her burgundy silk pajamas.

"I give up," she said. "Who?" She smiled as she looked down at her husband, who was grimacing at his orange pill bottles, and she couldn't believe how adorable he looked in his glasses.

"Your boyfriend," Lindsey said in a teasing tone. "One Mr. Joseph Walsh, the Great Kidnapper Of The Wild Heart."

Stevie couldn't help but laugh as she walked across to the other side of the bed to climb in beside him. She tossed his iPad out of the way and said, "Good for Joe! I heard he's doing a benefit concert with Keith Urban for veterans."

"He looks good, to tell you the truth," Lindsey admitted. "A fucking lot better than the last time I laid eyes on him!"

"Yeah, I think there was nowhere for him to go but up on that one." Stevie sighed as she backed herself against the pillows, picking up her copy of Daisy Jones And The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Karen had told her that the author had been inspired by Fleetwood Mac when she'd written the novel in interview format about the rise and fall of a 1970s rock band full of elicit romances, and now that it was apparently going to be a limited series on Amazon Prime in 2023, Stevie had to know what the fuss was about. She was halfway through the book and laughing to herself at the similarities, and she'd told Karen to email the author and tell her she loved her work. Next on her list was The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo. She turned to Lindsey, book in hand, and asked, "So are we watching it?"

Lindsey set his prescription bottles down on the nightstand and turned to his wife of thirty-eight years and said, "Actually, Mrs. Buckingham...I was thinking we could spend our time more productively..." He saw her smiling shyly at him as he leaned in to kiss her. Seventy-five in May and she still acts like a coy little girl at a high school dance when I touch her, he thought. My God, I have never loved her more.

"The kids are coming tomorrow morning to help us look through some stuff at the house," Stevie reminded him in between kisses as his hand ran up and down the length of a burgundy silk arm. "We have to be awake by nine because your daughter is a Buckingham through and through...up with the goddamn chickens, I swear."

Stevie and Lindsey's daughter had been born on March 3, 1984, three weeks early and in perfect health, with blue eyes like her father and a flair for the dramatic like her mother. Robin Emma Buckingham, named for two people who'd left their families too soon, had decided five years earlier at the age of thirty-one to become a mother, moving her successful podcast about classic rock stories into her home studio to raise her daughter, Stephanie. She and her husband, whose name, ironically enough, was Joe, were coming to the house the next day to search for old photographs and memories from her days on the road with her parents to share on a video episode of the podcast for Spotify, a podcast she'd titled It Was Only Rock And Roll But We Survived It.

Robin had grown up completely aware of her parents' history, including the night in Dallas in 1983 during the Wild Heart tour when Joe Walsh of the Eagles, high as hell after a four-day cocaine bender, had kidnapped Stevie and held her for a few hours in the basement of the concert venue, only to return her in the wee hours of the morning to Lindsey and her family and surrender himself to the police as the man who'd been the stalker throughout the tour. He'd pled guilty to conspiracy to commit kidnapping and served three months of a one-year sentence, and when he'd come up for parole in the spring of 1984, Stevie Nicks had appeared at the parole hearing with her newborn baby girl in her arms and testified that Joe Walsh was a disturbed man but not a dangerous one, and the story they'd shared that night in the Reunion Arena in Dallas proved to her that he had much remorse for his criminal behavior towards her.