Wylie called Margaret the night before the wedding with a last-ditch offer. He was in Massachusetts with his family. “I’ll send you a ticket here if you don’t marry him,” he said.
Margaret cried for hours. Lindsay stuck an ice pack on her face to keep the swelling down. Margaret knew that she wasn’t doing the right thing, that she was about to marry a man she hardly knew. But what was the alternative? Fly to Wylie? Cry on his shoulder? Tell him that one of her brothers had molested her for years—and that another killed himself—and that there were four more at home just like them?
To Margaret, that was no choice at all. Wylie wanted more from her than she could give anyone—a sincere, honest look at her own life. With Chris, she wouldn’t have to think about her family ever again.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 26
She hadn’t counted on missing the mountains so much.
Lindsay graduated Hotchkiss in 1984 in the top quarter of her class. She could have found a college farther away from home than Boulder. But Colorado, she was amazed to realize, had been calling to her—not Hidden Valley Road, exactly, but something about the state that felt like home. Now that she was back, she wanted to climb every fourteener she could see, all the time. And for a short time, she could commune with that place again, until all her usual fears came back.
At the University of Colorado, she got straight As doing hardly any work, and yet at odd moments she was overcome with panic. She had a social life, boyfriends, parties, drugs—nothing was stifling her anxiety. She found herself reading every self-help book she could find at any bookstore, trying to figure out why.
When she tried mushrooms for the first time, she thought that this must be what schizophrenia felt like: absolutely terrifying. She didn’t need mushrooms to be afraid. She had plenty to worry about without them.
She grew tired of pretending that nothing was wrong. She was looking for help, but she was unsure of where to find it.
* * *
—
“TELL ME ABOUT your family,” the campus therapist said.
Lindsay started talking. And then something happened. As she started explaining that she had ten older brothers and that six of them had schizophrenia, the look on the therapist’s face changed.
At first it seemed like she didn’t believe Lindsay—that she thought she was making the whole thing up. Then Lindsay saw what was really happening. The therapist was wondering how much of this was all in Lindsay’s head. She thought she was the crazy one.
The session went nowhere. Who would listen to her? Who would believe her?
That fall, Lindsay started seeing a boy, someone she’d known for years. Tim Howard was Sam and Nancy Gary’s nephew. Like Lindsay, he had been visiting the Garys’ lake house in Montana his entire life—another of the many children Sam and Nancy would host. Like a lot of boys, Tim had been in awe of the Galvin sisters—both stunning, both effortlessly athletic. Now he and Lindsay were in college together in Colorado.
Lindsay and Tim had been dating a few months when they both ended up as guests of the Garys in Vail during a school vacation, staying at the family’s condominium on the main strip. There came a time when they finally had the place to themselves—everyone else was either skiing or shopping—and they were on the verge of sleeping together.
Lindsay couldn’t.
Tim asked her what was the matter.
Lindsay looked at him.
This wasn’t an angry boyfriend, demanding sex. This was a boy, nearly a year younger than she was, who had been carrying a torch for her for the better part of a decade—a boy who genuinely liked her, who would not judge her. He knew a little bit about her family already, even if he didn’t know some of the more difficult details. And this was Tim, not some stranger. There may have been no safer person to tell.
Lindsay was in tears as she talked. This threw Tim, at first. She had always seemed so tough to him—a shtarker, like Sam had often called her; Yiddish for a tough guy, someone who knew how to get things done. But he stayed in the room with her. He listened.
She stopped short of revealing Jim’s identity. She didn’t say who had abused her, and he didn’t ask. When she stopped talking, he struggled with what to say.
“I don’t know what to do,” Tim finally said. “But I know who would.”
They got dressed and left the condo when Tim spotted Nancy Gary in the distance, walking toward them along the main drag. Tim left Lindsay and ran up to his aunt. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Lindsay stood there, snow on the ground around her, as Tim and Nancy talked. Barely a moment passed before Nancy cut away from Tim and marched down the lane to Lindsay. She and Nancy went inside and talked some more.
* * *
Louise Silvern remembered meeting Lindsay for the first time in 1984, listening to the pretty, self-possessed nineteen-year-old talk about her family and what had happened to her. Lindsay’s description of her family, and of the minute-to-minute experience of growing up in that house, was far and away the most traumatic story, certainly, that she had ever heard from a patient. And when Lindsay got to the part about the college health services therapist not believing her, she remembered being outraged. Job one, Silvern had always thought, was to not shut a patient down.
There is a narrative, or a myth, that our society indulges in about trauma and therapy, particularly in the wake of unspeakable childhood abuse. The myth starts with a child unable to speak, and takes flight when the right therapist is sensitive and kind enough to coax the child into a breakthrough. This is the mold established by Dr. Fried, the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann surrogate in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Once the child lets it all out, the trauma disappears like a bad dream. The patient is as good as cured—relieved and unburdened and ready to embrace the world again. In books and movies, the breakthrough happens in one fraught, angry, tearful session, perhaps late at night, after a small crisis triggers something in the patient that they’ve tried to keep bottled up for years.
In Lindsay’s case, the myth was barely half true. In Silvern—Lindsay’s second therapist, based in Boulder and referred by Nancy Gary—Lindsay found a professional listener who, yes, through sensitivity and kindness, created the safe, accepting space that was necessary for Lindsay to take control of her own story.