Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,153

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