MARK
MATTHEW
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 41
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.”
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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?
DONALD
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
MARK
MATTHEW