Margaret watched her mother take control—ordering her daughter, one more time, to go into the master bedroom and lock the door behind her. Margaret did what she was told, but put her ear to the door. After what seemed like forever, she heard a scuffle in the kitchen, some shouting—voices of other people.
Joe and Mark had come home from hockey practice. They were confronting Donald, protecting Mimi—possibly, Margaret thought at the time, saving her life.
Donald stomped out of the house, vowing he would never go back to the hospital. Margaret heard nothing after that, except for the sound of her mother crying.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 12
It was with no small measure of satisfaction—a declaration of victory may have been more like it—that Jim stepped in to help protect the youngest Galvins from Donald. Jim had often had all the younger boys and girls over to his house for sleepovers. He took Mary and Margaret to the movies and ice-skating and swimming, and skiing on the Broadmoor slopes, and riding on the Manitou Incline, a well-known funicular tourist attraction, where he had a job. He taught Margaret how to fly a kite and ride a bike. All the kids got rides on Jim’s Yamaha 550 motorcycle.
When things were too strained at home, Mimi and Don were all right with the girls spending entire weekends at Jim and Kathy’s house. Jim seemed on an even keel to them now, his stay at the hospital behind him. Kathy became almost like a mother to Mary, brushing and curling her hair while they all watched Sonny & Cher.
For the girls, it was an easy choice. They would much rather stay with Jim and Kathy if it meant avoiding Donald. To their parents, Jim was coming to the rescue, taking some of the burden away from them when they needed help the most.
Jim was so kind to the girls, so welcoming and accepting, that when he started to touch them, it almost seemed normal.
* * *
—
HIS APPROACHES WERE always the same. It would always be very late at night. Usually, he was drunk, after a shift at the bar. The TV would be on, and Kathy would be in bed, and he would come into the living room and lie beside Margaret on the green-flowered couch where she was sleeping. Margaret remembered the sound of bubbles from the fish tank, and the greenish blue damask pattern of the couch (a hand-me-down from Mimi), and the wicker rocking chair that was turned toward the kitchen, and the record albums standing in a row on the floor between cinder blocks, and the window looking out into the courtyard and toward another duplex, and the sound of the national anthem that played when the television stations went off the air. He’d penetrate Margaret with his fingers, and he’d try with his penis but could never accomplish it.
He had first gone after Margaret, as she remembered it, when she was about five—around 1967, a few years before Donald’s first commitment to Pueblo, when she first started having the occasional sleepover at his place. She was too young to understand what was happening as an act of violence. Manipulation and attention and predation all mingled together until, with nothing else to compare it to, what was happening seemed a little like love. And so when the occasional sleepover turned into long weekends, this seemed natural to Margaret. Once, she was with Jim at a store that sold polished decorative stones, and she spent a lot of time looking at one called the tiger’s eye. Jim bought it for her. For years she adored that stone—until the day, years later, that she finally realized just how wrong it all was.
Margaret’s feelings about Jim started to change when she was about twelve, before she had her period. This was when she began fending him off at