Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,159

still maintained possession of a set of her multiplex family samples, including many of the same families they used for their SHANK2 study.

They both knew what this might mean: Assuming they hadn’t been tossed in the trash at some point to make space in a freezer, DeLisi’s samples, including the genetic information of the Galvin family, were still sitting somewhere. DeLisi had no idea where—and even if she did, she had no say in how or when or even if it might be used again.

“Who did you deal with here?” McDonough asked. Maybe he could find that person and ask about it.

DeLisi gave him a name.

McDonough couldn’t believe it. Thousands of Pfizer employees, all around the world, and the one they were looking for happened, at that very moment, to be sitting just a few feet away from him.

McDonough could hardly resist. It was the end of the year. He had some money left in his budget. “I went ahead and had some of them sequenced,” he said. He picked out families with the largest number of relatives with schizophrenia that he could find. The Galvin family had been analyzed already, but there were others, maybe not as big, but big enough.

“Again, Lynn was ahead of her time,” McDonough said. “We intend to see if there’s anything there. Pfizer won’t be interested for its own drug discovery uses, so we have every incentive to publish them and just make the science known to the world.”

These families still have something to say. And now someone is listening.

DONALD

JOHN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

MARK

MATTHEW

PETER

MARGARET

LINDSAY

CHAPTER 44

Margaret and Lindsay barely talked or even texted in the six months after Mimi’s memorial. The one who cut off contact was Margaret. She saw Lindsay doing so much that it hurt—immersing herself in the Galvin family morass without ever coming up for air, and perhaps even damaging her relationships to her husband and children—and then turning around and admonishing others for not doing the same. Margaret did not see her ever stopping, or even slowing down. “I think there’s a lot of manipulation that takes place in our family,” Margaret said, “and I think that we’ve all been on the manipulative side and then the victim side of all of that. And so I find myself as I get older a little bit more assertive with my family, saying, you know, enough is enough.”

Only now that their mother wasn’t there as a shared focus for them did Margaret see how far apart she and her sister had grown. “Michael and Lindsay don’t like it that I don’t go in with them on the family dysfunction,” Margaret said, “but the boundary is helpful to me.”

Lindsay believed that Margaret saying that contact with the family was unhealthy for her was little more than a dodge—an attempt to preempt any criticism that she, Margaret, wasn’t helping enough. As Lindsay saw it, Margaret’s passion for self-care was really about her own unresolved fury. “She’s got a much higher level of anger towards my mother and my father for how they handled it,” Lindsay said. “She has a lot of anger towards my mentally ill brothers, particularly Donald and Jim. I still see a pretty big victim there.”

Lindsay repeated something she learned from Louise Silvern, her old therapist, and also from Nancy Gary, and, if she’s being honest with herself, from her own mother. “They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.” This, in her view, was the major difference between her and her sister.

“We both have worked very hard to save ourselves,” Lindsay said. “But she didn’t see trying to help them as any part of that, whereas I did.”

A few years earlier, Lindsay asked Sam Gary why she wasn’t brought to