She and Lindsay became roommates in a new place, a condominium where they split the rent. We are really lucky to have each other, Margaret wrote in her diary in 1987, and we have to remember that always. Wylie came out to Colorado to visit. He was the stable one, the one she’d known before her marriage and was a better fit for her. He was working on the trading floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He wanted to be with her. He always had.
Margaret still was afraid that being with Wylie would mean being honest about everything about herself. He’s pretty cool, she wrote in her diary, but he engulfs me with self-disclosure and it makes me retract.
* * *
—
MARGARET CONFRONTED JIM a few years after Lindsay did. While Lindsay had done it in person, if somewhat on the fly, Margaret did it over the phone, a safe enough distance away.
Jim denied everything, just as he had with Lindsay. And when Margaret opened up to her mother about Jim, Mimi reacted the same way she had with Lindsay: She shared her own experience with her stepfather, and then gave Jim a little benefit of the doubt because he had been sick.
Margaret was so angry she could barely function for weeks. She was teetering at a great height now; she could fall off one way or the other. If she stayed fearful and embarrassed and ashamed of her family, she thought she might never make it out alive. But she was not sure of any other way.
Wylie was there for Margaret now. She needed someone she trusted to stand by her while she recalibrated what sex and intimacy meant to her. They lived in Chicago together for a few years and then they moved back to Boulder together. They married in 1993 and started a family as she continued to search for a way forward.
She found a therapist, referred to her by Lindsay’s therapist, and supplemented that with countless nutritional and exercise regimens and nontraditional forms of therapy—the latter being something of a town specialty in Boulder. She tried art therapy at Naropa University and meditation at the Shambhala Center outside Fort Collins. She trained in the Hoffman Process, a retreat-based amalgam of Eastern mysticism, Gestalt, and group therapies, in which she indulged in creative visualization—turning her turmoil into a dragon, then trying to slay it. For a few years, she found solace in Brainspotting, an avant-garde trauma therapy concentrating on controlling one’s eye movements in the midst of creative visualization. An offshoot of the better-known Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, therapy, Brainspotting is meant to help a patient relive traumatic events, only this time with a sense of control and safety. (“The child whose memory we’re activating is getting nurtured,” her therapist, Mary Hartnett, would say.) In sessions tracking the direction and focus of her vision, Margaret ran through the whole catalogue of traumatic memories, starting with the smaller items: Jim slashing Lindsay’s car tires the night before her wedding, Donald naked on the floor of the empty house, all the furniture moved into the yard, Matt stripping naked at the Garys’. Gradually, with her therapist’s guidance, she worked her way up to the major traumas: Jim’s sexual abuse, Brian’s murder-suicide. After sessions, Margaret would sometimes cry for an hour and a half, grieving the loss of the life she could have had if they all had been normal. Then she would go straight to bed and sleep through the night.
In rethinking her life, Margaret kept coming back to her mother: Why did Mimi have all those children? Why did she protect the sick ones at the expense of the well ones? Why did she put both of her daughters in harm’s way by sending them on weekends to stay with Jim, whom she knew was insane? Slowly, she did her best to see her mother in a new way. She began to think that Mimi hadn’t been capable of seeing the sexual abuse going on right under her own nose because she, Mimi, had never really acknowledged her own abuse. Could that also have been the reason Mimi kept having baby after baby after baby, with no sense of limitation, no sense of scale or proportion? Her mother had been binging on family—running away from the past and trying to build something ideal. Something flawless.
For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, Margaret felt a kinship with her mother, as a survivor. She was getting closer to healing. But with the exception of her sister, she needed to keep her distance from the family to get it done.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 30
Lindsay went to the jail in Boulder and took a long, careful look at her brother. Peter was thirty-one but still could pass for a Colorado college kid, with his ruddy complexion and Eddie Bauer–ish wardrobe—goose down jacket, wool socks, hiking boots. He was, in many ways, the same rebellious spirit he’d been as a boy—bright and chatty and charming and always in trouble, fighting with his parents, ping-ponging between Hidden Valley Road and the hospital. But this pattern was intensifying, and Peter seemed lost, unable to modulate himself even a little now, and Lindsay was finally in a place in her life where she thought she might be able to help him.
At home with Don and Mimi, Peter had been flying into rages, once shattering most of the windows in the house. On one trip to Penrose Hospital—where, once alcohol withdrawal set in, he felt bugs crawl on his skin and saw maggots drop from the ceiling into his mouth—he was written up for “being inappropriate sexually with nurses on the ward” and even trying to assault one of them. Out in the world, Peter lived on the streets or crashed with acquaintances; once, after being arrested for reflecting a light into the eyes of drivers as they passed him on the side of a road, he announced that he was a pilot and that he needed to rescue the city. In his more fantastical moments, he’d vow that he was going to run the Federation of Rocky Mountain States just like his dad once did—reclaiming the throne for the family.
He had come to Boulder when he decided, in the middle of a court-ordered stay at the state hospital in Pueblo, to walk out and hitchhike to visit his little sisters. He ran into trouble as soon as he got there. On May 18, 1991, Peter was spotted shoplifting a pack of cigarettes at a 7-Eleven. When someone from the store chased him out, Peter sat down in front of the entrance and refused to move. Two police officers came by, and when one asked his name and date of birth, Peter replied “1851” before making a break for it. When the officers tried to stop him, Peter panicked and threw punches, hitting both of them in the face. Peter later would say he was just trying to shake them off. But the police cuffed him and charged him with second-degree assault on a police officer.
After Lindsay visited him in jail, the court transferred Peter to Pueblo, then back to jail in September with the recommendation that he be found incompetent and the criminal case not proceed. Lindsay seized the moment: She got Peter out on bond and took him home. She had a plan. She thought that the support of a sibling, combined with some therapy, might help mainstream Peter, break him out of his home-to-Pueblo revolving door. He was the youngest Galvin brother, and so Lindsay imagined that there was more hope for him than the others, that he might not be too far gone. Caught in the institutional pipeline since he was fourteen, Peter seemed to Lindsay to be little more than a victim—both of the system and of the Galvin family.