Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (35 page)

But she’s at sea?

“Yeah,” Donald said. “They live with an octopus.”

A human lives with an octopus?

“Yes. Octopuses have the ability to make man. To make many humans, all animals. When the flood comes, then they keep them alive in the water sometimes.”

And Mimi is there, as a triplet?

“Yeah. She’s a little one right now. A little baby. She’s out there, maybe five months old today.”

Would you like that to happen to you when you die?

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind,” Donald said.

JUST BEFORE IT
was time for Donald to return to Point of the Pines, they brought out the cake: chocolate with cut-up chunks of a Snickers bar on top. Donald had been so quiet all evening that he was almost not there, a shadow. But he seemed pleased by the attention now, smiling softly, his lips never parting.

Debbie lit the candles and brought the cake out to the patio where everyone was sitting—the same patio where they’d once kept Frederica and Atholl, and where Matt’s head slammed to the ground in a battle with Joe. As everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Donald—the oldest person in the room now, the paterfamilias—stood over the candles and broke out into a wider smile. Then he crossed his arms across his chest and closed his eyes, as if he were making a wish.

Lindsay had left Hidden Valley Road when she was thirteen, determined never to come home. She had moved from Boulder to Vail and then to Telluride, keeping her distance. But now, with Mimi gone, she was back there more often than she had been in years, seeing Donald, checking in on Matt, driving farther out to see Peter, and prepping the house for sale. As Lindsay drove the streets of Colorado Springs, memories revealed themselves to her—like the cottages west of the city, not far from where she had once hidden out with Kathy, when Jim got violent. “I drive by that all the time now,” she said.

She still felt like the youngest—like everything the family went through flowed down to her. Part of her will always want vindication—and she may always feel a little abandoned, a little insecure, tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. This might explain why she was working more than ever now, in addition to assuming the responsibility for her sick brothers’ medical care. Some days, she recognized the blessings of being detail-oriented, hyper-vigilant. “Louise joked in therapy—it’s only a red flag when it starts to create conflict in your life, but otherwise it’s a truly healthy coping mechanism for you to organize your sock drawer.” She laughed. “I’m very tidy.”

Her decision to do all this—to stay, and not drop everything—was as much of a mystery to her as it always had been.

“In all that therapeutic work,” she said, “the therapists I’ve had have been like, ‘Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me. You
survived
that?’ But what was the alternative? Succumbing to it? What would that look like? Be a heroin addict? I don’t know. As a child and for years into my young adulthood, I deeply wished that my brothers with mental illness would just die. But that was a gut-wrenching wish—it tore at me.”

A FEW MONTHS
after the funeral, the house at Hidden Valley Road went on the market. In the summer of 2018, the eventual buyer emailed a note to the broker.

Good Morning Galvin Family,

Thank you for allowing my husband & I the pleasure of viewing your family’s home last night—it is truly incredible. Walking through the home we could clearly see the care & the loving memories that went into this house and immediately wanted to continue its story. We hope that you will thoughtfully consider our offer as we would love to build our family there.

Thank you & we hope you have a wonderful day!

During one of her visits to Colorado Springs, Lindsay took a side trip to the state mental hospital in Pueblo to unearth what still survived of her brothers’ old medical records. Maybe she should have been prepared for a few more family secrets to be revealed. It was in a sublevel of the hospital’s main building, sifting through those papers—two shopping carts full of overstuffed accordion folders, pages poking out in every direction—that she first learned about Donald’s attempt to kill himself and his wife, Jean, with cyanide and acid. For all those years, Mimi had said merely that Donald became ill because his wife left him. The truth was something quite different, an attempted murder-suicide, not unlike Brian and Noni, three years later.

Lindsay also saw the medical report from Colorado State in which Donald talked about trying to commit suicide when he was twelve years old. This, too, was something no one in her generation ever knew. If Mimi had known, she’d never discussed it; again, it seemed easier, perhaps, for her to decide that it all went wrong for Donald after he left home, and not while he was in his mother’s care.

When Margaret learned this, she felt bamboozled all over again. “
I
had no idea Donald tried to kill his wife,” she said. “That also explains so much to me. I was never satisfied with the answer I was given—which was vague and only that he was getting sick.” Until the day she died, Mimi had preserved some of the illusion—maintaining the “before” picture, until there was nothing left to protect. Margaret couldn’t help but wonder what might have changed if her parents had been more forthcoming about Donald, if everyone had known what he’d tried to do with Jean. Would there have been more sensitivity about Brian’s state of mind? If her parents had been just a shade less secretive, could someone have prevented Brian from doing what he did? Would Lorelei Smith still be alive today?

The secrecy felt like an insult to Margaret—another rejection. “I was fed a line of bullshit from my parents. I think they must have wanted me to believe Donald was better than he was.”

At Pueblo, Lindsay found paperwork on all of their brothers, as well as a file about their father that offered yet another surprise. For several years before Don died, Lindsay learned, he’d been traveling to Pueblo on a regular basis for ECT sessions. The stated reason was depression he’d been experiencing since the early 1990s, after multiple occurrences of cancer and the death of one of his brothers. But of course this new information only brought on more questions. Was their father having ECT because of a clinical depression that was genetic, tied to schizophrenia? Was this the same condition that had hit him in Canada in 1955, as Mimi had thought? Or was Don caught up in an entirely new depression at the end of his life, because who wouldn’t be, in his situation—with one of his sons dead in a murder-suicide, another five hopelessly delusional, one a compulsive child molester? After so little about his life had turned out even remotely the way he’d wanted?

Mimi had to have known about Don’s ECT sessions. She’d gone there with him, and no doubt driven him home afterward, as often as once a month for years on end. She’d kept this secret, too. To be a member of the Galvin family is to never stop tripping on land mines of family history, buried in odd places, stashed away out of shame.

Lindsay didn’t know how to react to this one, except to muse yet again about the damage caused by that secrecy, and to try to live her own life differently. Maybe, she thought, her family’s story was not just about the secrets, not just about a disease—but about how all of that experience, with the help of Drs. Freedman and DeLisi, might make life better for others.

Was it worth it to them? Not really. But maybe there was something for her to hold on to now, with Robert Freedman’s choline trials and Lynn DeLisi’s SHANK2 revelation—a sense that their sacrifice may make it better for future generations. Isn’t that how science works—how history works?

One night a few years before Mimi got sick, Margaret woke up crying from a dream that was too much for her to bear.

In the dream, she and her sister were in Vail after a day of skiing. Lindsay didn’t say where they were going—and the knowledge that her little sister knew and Margaret did not is, perhaps, a telling detail in its own right—but soon Margaret realized they were heading toward the condominium owned by Sam and Nancy Gary. When they arrived, the door was unlocked.

Lindsay walked through, and Margaret followed her. They were alone. The place was not in the best shape. Lindsay said that Sam’s children use it now. That got Margaret thinking of all the Gary family members she once knew and had not seen in years. Sure enough, Nancy and Sam came through the door, along with their children and their friends. Clearly, they were having some sort of party to celebrate something.

Margaret felt awkward. She did not know why she was there. Only when she noticed her sister using a measuring tape to gauge the size of the room did she understand. They had been asked to help plan a party for Sam and Nancy.

It was too late now to set up. More guests were coming through the door, filing along a wooden walkway into the living room. Margaret saw Sam’s secretary, the Garys’ drivers, their cooks, their housekeepers, even the tennis instructor who came to Montana to give Margaret and the others lessons by the lake house. They all were older now, but Margaret recognized them just the same.

She was uneasy, convinced she did not belong there. Then one of the family’s tutors came up to her and smiled. “I don’t know why I’ve been gone so long,” Margaret told him. “You all are such great people.” The tutor replied, “Well, we’ve got to get you into our family history.”

Margaret felt better, but the feeling didn’t last. She overheard other guests mentioning other parties she hadn’t been invited to. Suddenly it all came back to her—the one-upmanship of the Denver social scene, how she never fit in, and how the only reason she ever came into contact with it was because of the breakdown of her own family. Everything came back to that deep well of rejection—of pain. Then came the tears.

WHEN YOU DON’T
find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else. In Margaret’s case, and perhaps Lindsay’s too, the first stop in that search had, tragically, been Jim’s house—a place away from home, with a family member who paid attention to her. For Margaret, the Garys’ home and the Kent Denver School represented more chances to belong somewhere—problematic, too, in their way.

Then came Margaret’s Deadhead years, traveling with a tribe of like-minded nomads, and her brief first marriage. Looking back, she felt lucky to have survived.
Did I really marry a guy who dealt drugs when I was twenty?
she wrote in her diary.

And then finally her decision to settle down with Wylie and have a family of her own. “I like to call him a safe harbor,” she said.

In the years when she and Wylie had their daughters and Margaret became a full-time mom, she grew preoccupied with maintaining some sense of emotional equilibrium. “You’re the
feeler
of the family,” Mimi often told Margaret, and on this point, at least, Margaret and her mother agreed. In therapy, Margaret had said that Brian’s death had been the pivotal moment of her childhood, as searing, even, as the abuse she experienced; she was eleven at the time, old enough to see the toll it took on everyone. But the trauma she dwelled on most often was abandonment—not just being sent away to the Garys, but being neglected before then, too, in favor of so many other siblings. “The kids who don’t get the attention are the ones who often need it most,” Margaret said. “At least that was my experience.”

Margaret thought often about something her mother always said of her and her sister: “The roses after all the thorns.” She and Lindsay were the roses, and all ten of her boys were the thorns. What most people saw as tender struck Margaret as ugly and passive-aggressive. What must the boys have felt, growing up hearing their mother say that? And how could the girls be secure, hearing praise for them in the same breath as such dismissive scorn?

As one of those two roses, Margaret never felt she had a shot at her mother’s love. If Mimi really loved her, she never would have sent her packing at the age of thirteen. Sometimes Margaret felt that her time with the Garys permanently separated her from her mother—that she had never gotten over that rejection and had spent the rest of her life trying to protect herself from being hurt that badly again.
I’ve already been cast aside as a throwaway, a cast-off,
Margaret once wrote in her diary. As time went on, she felt more of a right than ever to create distance between herself and everyone else.
I want the closeness of a normal family,
but frankly my family of origin is not normal.

To Margaret, her sister and her mother seemed like two peas in a pod. Mimi gave Lindsay furniture from her house and even sewed clothes for her, and Lindsay seemed to show no ambivalence in the slightest about taking care of Mimi in return. Margaret resented them both sometimes, though she needed them both, too.

ONE OF MARGARET’S
most vivid memories from just before she was taken from Hidden Valley Road—those months after Brian died, when she watched her father and her brothers falling apart all around her—was her mother staying up late, long after the children were in bed, to draw and paint—birds and mushrooms, mostly. When Margaret thought about that later, she was beyond confused. How could Mimi still be puttering around the house, watching for the fox and the family of deer that ambled by the backyard, reporting on the dramatic loss of birds at the bird feeder? This was the same woman she’d just seen wailing with grief over Brian. What did her mother have inside that Margaret didn’t? Was it strength, or denial, or something she couldn’t understand? Only later did she arrive at the idea that the natural world Mimi had fallen in love with in Colorado offered her some small measure of solace, a refuge from everything else that was happening.

Once Margaret, in her adult years, finally worked up the bravery to start painting, her subject, more often than not, was the very thing she had spent a lifetime trying to avoid: her family. She painted flowers that her mother loved, with a stirring realism. She made one painting about the Garys, called
Gray Ease;
another called
Sophisticated,
about her own journey, learning to be vulnerable; and another called
Compartmentalizing the Grief
. She veered into abstraction in a striking series of twelve paintings based on the twelve Galvin children.
Donald
is red and white;
Jim
is a spectral black and white;
John,
Brian, Michael,
and
Richard
are variations on greenish yellow;
Joseph
is yellow with red seeping through;
Mark, Matthew,
and
Peter
are all studies in red, with only Peter’s including flashes of blue.

Mary
is a cross-hatch of thick streaks of soft pink, inflected here and there with black. And Margaret’s self-portrait is similar to her sister’s, only with less pink and more vivid rust-colored flecks.

When, a few years before Mimi died, Margaret helped relocate Peter to his assisted living facility, that inspired another piece,
Moving Peter,
that seemed like a step forward for her—complex and layered and full of the feelings she found so hard to process any other way. “It just became this emotional outpouring,” Margaret said.

This was the painting Nancy Gary bought, snapping it up before an old classmate of Margaret’s from the Kent Denver School had the chance to buy it.