In Boulder, Margaret was in classes with many of her old Kent friends, the rich ones who traveled to France or Portugal every summer. She did her best to have enough money to at least have fun domestically. She scooped at Steve’s Ice Cream and had a second, semiregular job dealing mushrooms for a much older supplier—a guy who leered at her a lot but never made a move on her. With an old Kent School boyfriend, she saw as many as fifty Grateful Dead shows, all around the country, most of them while drenched in coke and acid. Margaret wanted to feel strong and capable and independent. But some part of her was waiting to be rescued—to keep her from ever having to engage directly with anything deeper.
Why do I even go home? My mind feels like it’s going to wind up so much that it won’t ever stop spinning. I cannot understand or cope with my brothers, especially Matt, Peter, Joe and Donald. I’m in tears right now because I can’t handle any of it….Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you. My family depresses me, they hinder my progress in many ways. I’m stuck with insanities that no one should have to go through life trying to ignore….
Margaret’s diary, April 3, 1983
That summer, Margaret was out east following the Dead when she found herself swept off her feet in a way she only had dreamed. Chris had been an upperclassman at Skidmore when Margaret was there and had noticed her then. In college he’d been known as Hot Knives—the name for a technique in which you take a piece of hash and smash it between two red-hot knives, and then inhale the smoke. When Chris saw her again now, at a party in Connecticut, he made his move.
Chris was a few years older than she was, with an aggressive, nimble intellect. His father was an oil executive, and Chris was a fixture at his family’s yacht club, racing Laser-class sailboats in championships around the world. He paid to fly Margaret out to Maine in August to see him again. They went boating to the islands off Georgetown and Boothbay, drank Bloody Marys and blueberry daiquiris, ate lobster, and brought nineteen more of them back to Connecticut, where he introduced her to his parents. The next day, they sped into Manhattan in his BMW for shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s. To Margaret, Chris wasn’t just another guy. He was an entirely new narrative.
I never thought I’d meet a man with so much to offer, and the outrageous part is he wants to share it with me.
August 31, 1983
She went back again in September. He flew out to see her in Colorado in October, and again on Thanksgiving. And on New Year’s Eve, they were together again in Manhattan, dressed brilliantly, ringing in the new year at the Rainbow Room. They both were half-done-in by champagne and coke and pot when, in the first moments of 1984, Chris leaned in toward her, conspiratorially.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Yeah.”
“Will you marry me?”
* * *
—
“YOU’RE NOT GETTING married to this guy. That’s ridiculous.”
This was Wylie, a classmate of Margaret’s in Boulder, another love interest, or at least he hoped to be. While Chris was a competitive sailor, Wylie spent the warmer months painting houses. Wylie was level-headed and soft-spoken, usually. But this news, and the ring on Margaret’s finger, took him by surprise.
But she was serious. No one was taking care of her anymore—not her family, not the Garys. Chris was ready. Trips to Germany and Crete and Egypt were all planned out.
Lindsay got it. She might have been the only other person on the planet who really knew what Margaret was running from. This was her sister’s chance to have a new family.
Mimi and Don approved, too. Aware of Chris’s family’s wealth, they mortgaged their house to host the finest wedding they could manage. Mimi made all the dresses herself from an Oscar de la Renta pattern, pink silk with ruffles around the bottom and top.
They set a date for August. All Margaret needed to do now was navigate a path through her brothers—all nine of them—to the altar without a scene.
* * *
—
IN THE MONTHS before the wedding, Peter was arrested in Vail for soliciting funds on the street for what he was calling a cancer society benefit. At the hospital, he asked the doctors for a bulletproof vest to protect himself. The Vail police, he said, were jealous of him and out to get him. Eventually Peter made it back to Hidden Valley Road with Mimi and Don, staying in bed, not bathing, subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, alternating between long periods of silence and occasional explosive outbursts. Once, he locked Mimi out of the house and put his medicine in the family’s coffee.
Two of the other hockey brothers, Joe and Matt, were in and out of Pueblo at the same time. Joe was preoccupied by Catholic imagery, like his brother Donald, but never grew menacing like Donald once had; the voices in his head were not so much evil, he would say, as bothersome. Matt’s fantasies were more paranoid, making it hard for him to stay stable for long. Between hospital stays, he was arrested once for loitering in Colorado Springs and placed on probation.
Donald had been living more or less peaceably at home since his last state hospital visit in 1980. Now the one everyone was most wary of was Jim.
Earlier that year, after sixteen years of marriage, Kathy had finally left her abusive husband. For years, she’d worked and raised their son, Jimmy, while steering around Jim’s ups and downs. Her friends all knew about Jim—his mental illness and the abuse—and yet Kathy never made a move until the first time she saw him strike their son. Jimmy was fourteen. Jim hadn’t touched him before then. He saw Jim about to hit Kathy and got between them, facing off against his father for the first time, trying to protect his mother. When Jim punched his own son in the stomach, Kathy called the police. She left with Jimmy soon after.
Now Jim was living alone, still getting outpatient shots of a neuroleptic drug to keep his symptoms in check. But he was working less and drinking more. No one in the family knew what he might be capable of.
A few days before Margaret’s wedding, Jim came by the house on Hidden Valley Road, where Lindsay was staying with a boyfriend for the weekend. When Jim arrived, Lindsay wasn’t there, but her boyfriend’s car was. Others in the house watched Jim as he slashed all four tires, screamed obscenities at the top of his lungs, and drove off.
Lindsay and her boyfriend moved that night to a friend’s cabin, where Jim could not find them. If there had been even a little doubt in Lindsay’s mind that Margaret was right to start a new life with Chris, there wasn’t any now. Part of her wished she had a similar ticket out.
* * *
—
THE REHEARSAL DINNER was at the Garden of the Gods country club. At least two hundred people would attend the church ceremony, followed by a reception in the backyard of a family friend’s new home in Broadmoor, the fanciest part of Colorado Springs.