rehab, visiting a counselor there once a week. Instead of smoking pot each morning, she headed out for runs up Flagstaff Mountain. She found a job at a tchotchke shop on the Pearl Street Mall, started yoga, and contemplated new ways of thinking, phrases like “stepping into the softness of myself.” It was, she sometimes thought, like making a new friend.
But unlike her sister, Margaret had no real desire to delve into her family issues or seek deeper therapy. She wanted to be gentle with herself. She went camping and mountain biking in Moab in Utah, captivated by the immense red rocks all around her. She rode more than a hundred miles along the White Rim trail inside Canyonlands National Park—four days and three nights. The Nutrition Almanac became her new bible; she did almost all of her shopping at Alfalfa’s, the only health food store in Colorado at the time. Slowly she felt able to look closely at some of the things she’d been running from for years. The pain of dealing with her collapsed marriage. The residue of years of sexual abuse by Jim. The unresolved issues with her entire family.
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.
* * *
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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