“What?”
“Yeah. I’m—I’m freaking out. I’m doing this Earth Day presentation at my daughter’s school and—and he’s dead. They found him in an elevator at Paisley.”
There was a moment of muffled shock while the words sank in, and then it was as if I’d been sucked into a funnel cloud, everything spinning around me—the traffic roaring by, Willy yowling in the back seat, the sky falling in front of the windshield. I heard myself screaming, “No no no no no.…”
Not him. Not like that. Not alone. Not now.
I don’t remember what was said after that. I just remember both of us crying. I remember gripping the steering wheel, forcing myself to breathe, to open my eyes, to steer back into the traffic and find a way to turn around. I needed to go home. I needed to call Mama.
In the hours that followed, I felt lost in a riptide of memory and emotion, which felt more real to me than the firestorm of rumors in the press. I paced the patio outside my house until my manager, Gladys, sent me a text that simply said: Go inside. Attached was a grainy, zoom-lens photo of me that had just appeared online. My ex-husband was adamant about never being seen without perfect hair and makeup. This photo was the antithesis of that. I wanted to care, but I couldn’t feel anything except dry irony. I drifted inside and sat with the blinds drawn for two days. Reporters remained camped outside, pointing cameras at the windows, yelling my name every time someone stepped in or out of the door.
The story of Prince’s death was repeated over and over on the 24-hour news channels. At first, the headlines were blunt: PRINCE DEAD AT 57. Then sentimental: WORLD MOURNS MUSIC LEGEND. Then speculative: THE DRUG THAT KILLED PRINCE: WHAT IS FENTANYL? Inevitably, they became sordid: LOVE MACHINE PRINCE WAS CELIBATE FOR LAST 8 YEARS. People who may or may not have known him crawled out of every crevice of the Internet, eager to comment. My phone was blowing up. Mama’s phone was blowing up. There was a barrage of requests from networks and news channels and radio stations, wanting to book Prince’s first wife.
Mama kept telling them, “She’s not doing any press.”
They kept telling her, “At the very least, she should make some sort of comment.”
I had no comment. Truly. Nothing I could say about this man could be squeezed into a three-minute morning show segment. There was a story to be told, but I wanted to tell it in my own way, in my own time, not in sound bites that would be edited to accommodate their dead-rock-star narrative, and at the time, I felt too raw, too exposed. Before I could think about anything else, I needed to be at Paisley. I heard there was to be a memorial service but couldn’t get any solid information. I wasn’t even sure I would be invited.
“It’s weird,” Manuela told me. “Everything’s locked down.”
Prince’s coworkers were like family, to him and to me, so I called Wendy and Lisa, his Purple Rain bandmates, and Sheila E, his longtime friend and collaborator and former fiancée.
“Come,” Wendy and Lisa both said. “We’ve got you.”
“You’re my sis,” said Sheila. “We are all family.”
So here I am, along with family and fans and other people who knew and loved and worked with this extraordinary artist. The house we lived in—the house where we made a life together and created two babies—is gone. Years ago, in the darkest possible state of mind, he had it bulldozed to the ground and the contents burned. The elaborate playground he built for our children was torn down to make way for a restaurant so he wouldn’t have to go out for food, but as I understand it, no one got the proper permits, so the restaurant didn’t happen. Looking out across the land, the wealth of timber, the prime real estate, I suspect that very soon the forests around the office complex will disappear as well.
“Mommy, is it time to go?” Gia says. One-thousand-one.
“Almost. I want to take your picture.”
“Mommy, no!” She groans, utterly out of patience. “Don’t take my picture.”
I laugh at that, because she’s standing in front of the glass doors where my father stole a picture of me more than twenty years ago. He raised his Instamatic camera just as I walked out, and I scolded him, “Dad, no! He doesn’t like people taking pictures here.”
“Trust me,” said my father, “you’ll be glad I did.”
The sweet sting of that memory brings tears to my eyes. He was right, of course. That photograph is precious to me now.
“Trust me,” I tell Gia, “you’ll want to remember all this.”