As Mimi doubled down on her perfectionism, the girls became her most trusted deputies. Both girls tried to help their mother—taking out the trash, mopping the floor, washing the dishes, setting the table, vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms—as if there wasn’t a sick twenty-five-year-old man stalking the yard or writhing on the floor. Six o’clock remained the dinner hour, and whoever was home was expected to sit down and eat—even if, in the case of Donald, he had spent much of the day dressed in a monk’s robe. Mimi also tried to include Donald in family outings, but the results were mixed. When she brought him to a hockey game, he got down on his knees in the middle of the crowd and started praying. That evening, as he chewed on a mouthful of steak, he announced to everyone at the table that he was eating his father’s heart.
Hoping things might turn around for Donald did not seem to work in the slightest. Margaret turned nine, ten, and eleven on Hidden Valley Road with Donald dominating everything about their home life. Margaret and Mary got used to him exchanging blows with the brothers still at home—Joe, Mark, Matt, and Peter. Once, Donald thought one brother had made off with his medicine and tried to choke him. Another time, Donald took an entire bottle of pills and an ambulance came for him, again. The only person willing to break the silence around the problem of Donald was Jim, the maverick second son, who took pleasure in dropping by and saying what he was sure everyone else was thinking. Shut the fuck up. Get out. Why don’t you leave? Why don’t you get out of here? What are you doing living here at your age?
Jim came up with a nickname for Donald: Gookoid. That name stuck. Most of the younger siblings invoked the name more than once a day. Teasing Donald felt better than avoiding him, which drained them of all agency. Making Donald the brunt of their jokes gave them a sense of power over a situation they had no explanation for—and reassured them that whatever Donald was, he was not them.
* * *
—
ONE AFTERNOON, DONALD pulled a knife on Mimi. Margaret dashed to the phone in the kitchen and tried to call the police again—but this time, Donald lurched around and yanked the phone out of the wall. Margaret started wailing, sobbing. The wire from the phone had given her an electric shock.
Margaret watched her mother take control—ordering her daughter, one more time, to go into the master bedroom and lock the door behind her. Margaret did what she was told, but put her ear to the door. After what seemed like forever, she heard a scuffle in the kitchen, some shouting—voices of other people.
Joe and Mark had come home from hockey practice. They were confronting Donald, protecting Mimi—possibly, Margaret thought at the time, saving her life.
Donald stomped out of the house, vowing he would never go back to the hospital. Margaret heard nothing after that, except for the sound of her mother crying.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 12
It was with no small measure of satisfaction—a declaration of victory may have been more like it—that Jim stepped in to help protect the youngest Galvins from Donald. Jim had often had all the younger boys and girls over to his house for sleepovers. He took Mary and Margaret to the movies and ice-skating and swimming, and skiing on the Broadmoor slopes, and riding on the Manitou Incline, a well-known funicular tourist attraction, where he had a job. He taught Margaret how to fly a kite and ride a bike. All the kids got rides on Jim’s Yamaha 550 motorcycle.
When things were too strained at home, Mimi and Don were all right with the girls spending entire weekends at Jim and Kathy’s house. Jim seemed on an even keel to them now, his stay at the hospital behind him. Kathy became almost like a mother to Mary, brushing and curling her hair while they all watched Sonny & Cher.
For the girls, it was an easy choice. They would much rather stay with Jim and Kathy if it meant avoiding Donald. To their parents, Jim was coming to the rescue, taking some of the burden away from them when they needed help the most.
Jim was so kind to the girls, so welcoming and accepting, that when he started to touch them, it almost seemed normal.
* * *
—
HIS APPROACHES WERE always the same. It would always be very late at night. Usually, he was drunk, after a shift at the bar. The TV would be on, and Kathy would be in bed, and he would come into the living room and lie beside Margaret on the green-flowered couch where she was sleeping. Margaret remembered the sound of bubbles from the fish tank, and the greenish blue damask pattern of the couch (a hand-me-down from Mimi), and the wicker rocking chair that was turned toward the kitchen, and the record albums standing in a row on the floor between cinder blocks, and the window looking out into the courtyard and toward another duplex, and the sound of the national anthem that played when the television stations went off the air. He’d penetrate Margaret with his fingers, and he’d try with his penis but could never accomplish it.
He had first gone after Margaret, as she remembered it, when she was about five—around 1967, a few years before Donald’s first commitment to Pueblo, when she first started having the occasional sleepover at his place. She was too young to understand what was happening as an act of violence. Manipulation and attention and predation all mingled together until, with nothing else to compare it to, what was happening seemed a little like love. And so when the occasional sleepover turned into long weekends, this seemed natural to Margaret. Once, she was with Jim at a store that sold polished decorative stones, and she spent a lot of time looking at one called the tiger’s eye. Jim bought it for her. For years she adored that stone—until the day, years later, that she finally realized just how wrong it all was.
Margaret’s feelings about Jim started to change when she was about twelve, before she had her period. This was when she began fending him off at night, refusing him. Even then, she told no one about what Jim had been doing—especially not her little sister, Mary, who in Margaret’s view seemed far too young to be allowed to know. What Margaret hadn’t considered was that Jim would turn to Mary as soon as Margaret thwarted him.
Mary had been about seven, maybe eight, when she had a moment alone with her big sister and asked if she, too, had ever been bothered by Jim. Margaret’s answer was short, definitive—a conversation-stopper. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It would be years before the sisters would talk about Jim again.