Everybody Loves You

She Does Hear Him All Night Long (Lindsey's Story)

Malibu, California
Monday, January 9, 2023
(6:00 pm)
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I spent the night in Stevie's closet the night Robin Snyder died.

Two days earlier, October 3, 1982, had been my birthday. I was thirty-three. It was also the day that Robin's son Matthew had been born by emergency cesarean two and a half months early because it was apparent to the doctors that her death was days away and she'd told Kim the baby had to be saved no matter what.

Stevie's entire house was dark when I pulled up the winding driveway...all but one window, the window of her bedroom. I came upstairs armed with a box of Animal Crackers and a bottle of brandy, both of which I figured she'd need desperately. She'd been in this bizarre and, quite frankly, frightening mindset that her house was haunted, and she'd been sleeping in her walk-in closet with a pillow, a blanket knit by Barbara when she was a baby, her journal, a portable stereo, and poor little Ginny the dog, who was about thirteen by then and a senior citizen. Stevie had gone completely bananas when Robin got sick, and that's when the whole haunted house thing began. It's what her song "Sable On Blonde" is about. I was worried sick.

Anyway, I crawled in there with her, and she was a wreck. The worst I'd ever seen her. I won't even tell you how much cocaine she'd consumed because that's her story to tell, but she was staring off into space and talking about how she felt like they'd amputated her leg or something because she felt like she was missing a limb now. Eventually I kicked off my shoes and we got under the blanket and I held her, and the dog curled up between our feet and went to sleep. Stevie was motionless, like a statue, but when I began to stroke her hair to get her to sleep - that was the magic trick, I knew - she began to cry. I felt the trembling.

"Sssh...it's okay, baby," I whispered, and I kissed down at her hair. It was permed back then and that night it smelled like vanilla and brandy. I didn't ask how much she'd had to drink before I'd arrived, but she'd put away half the bottle I'd brought over and I didn't say a word. Stevie drinking because she was angry at my "Gypsy" arrangements in France was one thing...drinking away the pain of losing her best friend was another.

"I'm broken now," she said in a tone that frightened me a lot more than I admitted to her in later years, when that night came up in a conversation or a fight. "She broke me. She literally took her with me. I'm dead too...but my body hasn't heard."

"You're alive, angel, and you're going to live a long, long time," I assured her in a whisper, then kissed her forehead to prove it.

"That's a terrible thing to say," she said. "You're wishing me another sixty years all alone?"  She sounded angry, but not at me...more like at the idea.

"You'll never be alone," I promised. I meant it, too. "Try to go to sleep, angel, okay? Do you want to move to the bed out there?" We were on the closet floor, and her fur coat was tickling my cheek from above us. Stevie lifted her head and looked at me like I'd just asked her to join the Communist Party, or rob a bank, or torture small animals.

"No! I told you...it's not safe out there!" She wasn't crying anymore, but her face was wet with tears. I brushed them away with my thumbs.

"Okay, okay," I relented, and only when she'd looked in my eyes and seen that I understood did she lay back down. Her head was on my chest and our legs were tangled up together and I was reminded of the nights I'd spent in her room in France the year before, when Robin was going through chemo and Stevie was having nightmares almost every night. I wrapped my arms around her and closed my eyes, settling in for a night on the closet floor wearing jeans and a t-shirt because I hadn't thought to pack a bag or even undress, lying on the gray shag carpet with one pillow below my head, half-covered in a big pink and yellow knit blanket Barbara Nicks had made in 1948, embroidered with Stephanie Lynn in the corner. My back hurt and that fucking sable coat was hanging right over me...but I wouldn't have let her go for anything in the world. She and Ginny were both snoring minutes later.