Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,75

right—that they would find a doctor and figure out what was wrong.

And she remembered Donald running away from time to time—most often to Oregon, to find Jean—and her parents having to track him down, then send him plane or bus tickets.

And she remembered Donald at night again, this time terrified, yelling for everyone to get to safety. There were people in the house, he was saying, people trying to hurt them all.

She remembered believing him. Why would he lie?

* * *

—

MARY WAS DIFFERENT from her big sister. Margaret was tender, empathic, and emotional; she would witness her family’s difficulties and internalize them, hardly able to bear the pain. Mary, meanwhile, may have been every bit as vulnerable, but she was also more practical, shrewd, and, perhaps by necessity now, independent. In first grade, she had been the only child to raise her hand for George McGovern and not Richard Nixon in her class’s mock presidential election. Later on, when she got caught with a cigarette at school, her mother asked what they ought to do about it, and Mary said, “Put up No Smoking signs.”

* * *

—

Once Margaret left home, taken away to Denver with Nancy and Sam Gary, Mary ricocheted between fury and silence. Her sister’s absence ate away at her. She could not understand why she was left behind. Her parents had tried to explain that she was not old enough for the private school Margaret attended there, but that meant nothing to Mary. It didn’t change how breathtakingly sudden it all had seemed to her.

In the fifth grade in 1976, Mary was all but alone—watching the fights among the brothers still at home. Peter was testing everyone around him, cycling in and out of the hospital and clashing with Matt, the last of the hockey boys still living at home. Donald had moved into Margaret’s room, next to Mary’s; the idea was to distance him from the other boys, who slept downstairs, but that just made him even less avoidable to Mary. When he wasn’t sleeping off his medications, Donald was pacing and gesticulating and talking to himself. Mary was embarrassed, snapping at him. When that didn’t work, she pleaded. And when that also didn’t work, she would cry, but not around anyone else. She spent hours in her bedroom, organizing and reorganizing her closet and her desk drawers, lost in thought, in an attempt to have some sense of control.

Out in the world, as she entered junior high school, Mary was all smiles—popular socially, spending more time at friends’ houses than at home. She knew that other children weren’t allowed to come to her house anymore. She didn’t want to be there, either. So she kept to a routine that would keep her away from Hidden Valley Road for as long as possible—from school to soccer in the afternoons and then evenings and Saturdays at the ballet studio at Colorado College; long visits to the Hefley family, who had a horse with a stall that could always use cleaning; anyplace but home.

Mary’s mother, after making herself so vulnerable to Nancy Gary and allowing the Gary family to take Margaret in, had tried to return to her old form, putting on a brave and cheerful face in public. With Mary, Mimi demonstrated the importance of not talking about it, of pretending it wasn’t happening—of not crying, not getting mad, not betraying the slightest emotion. The same sort of forced equanimity was expected of all the children. On drives from school to practice, or to the Chinook book shop in Colorado Springs, or to tea with the Crocketts or the Griffiths, Mimi offered Mary no explanation of why the brothers were the way they were, or what they could do to help. The most she would say was that the troubles of an eleven-year-old girl amounted to nothing compared to what her brothers were going through.

When Mary felt most helpless, she found a private place in the Woodmen Valley where she could hide, a few hundred yards from the house, on the other side of the hill in their backyard. She called it the Fairy Rocks. Mary would make believe that the Fairy Rocks were her home—pretending to cook dinner there, go to bed there, and wake up there the next