Buckingham Nicks A/U Series Part 4: The Dance

Chain, Keep Us Together

Paradise Valley, Arizona
Thursday, July 3, 1997
(2:00 am)
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"I'm going to murder him. I'm going to drag him out into the fucking desert and I'm going to murder him."

Lindsey was driving like a maniac through the darkness, taking his anger out on the gas pedal of his father-in-law's Chrysler LeBaron. Stevie sat beside him and stared out at the open rode, wondering if her view beyond the windshield was the last thing her daughter had seen before everything had turned to black.

"Lindsey, as pissed off as I am at Aaron, he was not driving the car," Stevie said, her attempt at reasoning with her husband failing miserably from the start. "He wasn't even there."

"She's covering for him," Lindsey insisted. "She's a good kid and she loves her brother and she knows his ass would be grass he admitted to a DUI, so she covered for him."

"I think that's a bit of a reach, Linds." Stevie turned to her husband, who was driving like Mario Andretti towards the hospital where their daughter was being treated for injuries after falling asleep at the wheel, according to what the police officer had told Barbara on the phone, and she wasn't sure what was frightening her more - her daughter's condition, or the anger her husband had in his heart for their only son. Part of her had wondered back in May, when Julia had confided in her that Sara had called her and explained the things that Aaron had been doing, if she should have confronted him, asked him if he was okay, made him tell her, mother to son, what was wrong. But The Mac was scrambling to put the reunion show together, she'd just found out she was pregnant at forty-nine, her birthday weekend after the high of the taping nights had overshadowed the problems in their family, and by then it seemed too late.

If I had confronted Aaron in May, she thought, he would not have fought with Lindsey tonight. Therefore, Julia wouldn't have had to drive him to Chris and Lori's, and she would be okay right now, sound asleep in her grandmother's house. This is my fault.

She didn't dare voice her concerns to Lindsey. He was likely to run the car off the road...or ask for a divorce...or both. Lindsey loved his children equally, but there had always been something special between him and his first born, a friendship that had formed as soon as she'd learned to talk, a bond that had formed the first time he'd held her and watched her tiny hand curl around his finger. They could talk for hours about everything and nothing, mostly music and politics, about which they shared the same views. Watching Lindsey talk to his oldest child was like watching a dance, choreographed by empathy and love and a shared idea of the universe and how it worked, and what to do about it.

If Lindsey ever lost Julia, he'd be lost forever too, Stevie thought. He would never come back from that one.

She sat back and tried to remind herself that the situation they were driving towards that night was not a life-or-death situation. The policeman had informed Barbara on the phone that Julia was being treated in the ER for a broken ankle, most likely from slamming on the brakes at the last minute before swerving into the median on the road, and various scrapes and bruises. "The airbags and seatbelt saved her from going through the windshield, Mrs. Nicks," Barbara had been told on the phone, and she had tried to tell Stevie that over the near hyperventilation as she'd woken up to her mother's face looking so grave as it hovered over her on the sofa beside Lindsey where they'd fallen asleep.

Lindsey screeched the LeBaron into the parking lot of the hospital and slammed the door shut on his way out of the car, forgetting about his pregnant wife in the passenger's seat in his fear over his daughter and his anger at his son. Stevie climbed out of the car by herself, slinging her straw summer purse over her shoulder and trying like mad to keep up at four months pregnant and almost a foot shorter than him and taking much smaller steps. "Lindsey! Jesus Christ!" she shouted at him from behind, and only then did he slow down to let her catch up. For a moment - just a tiny fleeting moment - she saw a flash of young, impatient, brooding Lindsey, the man who'd left her stranded in Aspen with strep throat from the cold and not enough money to get home to L.A. She forced herself to shrug it off. He didn't mean her any harm; he was worried about Julia and enraged at Aaron, she reminded herself.