Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,155

Suddenly it all came back to her—the one-upmanship of the Denver social scene, how she never fit in, and how the only reason she ever came into contact with it was because of the breakdown of her own family. Everything came back to that deep well of rejection—of pain. Then came the tears.

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WHEN YOU DON’T find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else. In Margaret’s case, and perhaps Lindsay’s too, the first stop in that search had, tragically, been Jim’s house—a place away from home, with a family member who paid attention to her. For Margaret, the Garys’ home and the Kent Denver School represented more chances to belong somewhere—problematic, too, in their way.

Then came Margaret’s Deadhead years, traveling with a tribe of like-minded nomads, and her brief first marriage. Looking back, she felt lucky to have survived. Did I really marry a guy who dealt drugs when I was twenty? she wrote in her diary.

And then finally her decision to settle down with Wylie and have a family of her own. “I like to call him a safe harbor,” she said.

In the years when she and Wylie had their daughters and Margaret became a full-time mom, she grew preoccupied with maintaining some sense of emotional equilibrium. “You’re the feeler of the family,” Mimi often told Margaret, and on this point, at least, Margaret and her mother agreed. In therapy, Margaret had said that Brian’s death had been the pivotal moment of her childhood, as searing, even, as the abuse she experienced; she was eleven at the time, old enough to see the toll it took on everyone. But the trauma she dwelled on most often was abandonment—not just being sent away to the Garys, but being neglected before then, too, in favor of so many other siblings. “The kids who don’t get the attention are the ones who often need it most,” Margaret said. “At least that was my experience.”

Margaret thought often about something her mother always said of her and her sister: “The roses after all the thorns.” She and Lindsay were the roses, and all ten of her boys were the thorns. What most people saw as tender struck Margaret as ugly and passive-aggressive. What must the boys have felt, growing up hearing their mother say that? And how could the girls be secure, hearing praise for them in the same breath as such dismissive scorn?

As one of those two roses, Margaret never felt she had a shot at her mother’s love. If Mimi really loved her, she never would have sent her packing at the age of thirteen. Sometimes Margaret felt that her time with the Garys permanently separated her from her mother—that she had never gotten over that rejection and had spent the rest of her life trying to protect herself from being hurt that badly again. I’ve already been cast aside as a throwaway, a cast-off, Margaret once wrote in her diary. As time went on, she felt more of a right than ever to create distance between herself and everyone else. I want the closeness of a normal family, but frankly my family of origin is not normal.

To Margaret, her sister and her mother seemed like two peas in a pod. Mimi gave Lindsay furniture from her house and even sewed clothes for her, and Lindsay seemed to show no ambivalence in the slightest about taking care of Mimi in return. Margaret resented them both sometimes, though she needed them both, too.

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ONE OF MARGARET’S most vivid memories from just before she was taken from Hidden Valley Road—those months after Brian died, when she watched her father and her brothers falling apart all around her—was her mother staying up late, long after the children were in bed, to draw and paint—birds and mushrooms, mostly. When Margaret thought about that later, she was beyond confused. How could Mimi still be puttering around the house, watching for the fox and the family of deer that ambled by the backyard, reporting on the dramatic loss of birds at the bird feeder? This was the same woman she’d just seen wailing with grief over Brian. What did her mother have inside that Margaret didn’t? Was it strength, or denial, or something