the Garys had taken in. There was a boy the Garys had met on a trip to Mexico, and another girl from Denver. Sam was open about his philosophy of life—how while he may have worked hard, he also felt lucky, and so he felt the need to help those who needed it when he could.
A fifth child of theirs was treated for a time at the private Menninger Clinic, which specialized in schizophrenia. That was an option that Nancy and Sam must have known Don and Mimi could never afford. But there were limitations to their help, of course. They weren’t going to help all the Galvins, and so they took one girl—the one old enough to attend the Kent Denver School.
Even during some of Margaret’s most comfortable moments there, her thoughts—her greatest enemy now—turned to the nature of that charity. Her mind started playing what-if games that made her feel more and more like she was walking on eggshells. What if Sam had never asked her dad to help him find those government wildcatting contracts? What if Sam had given up on drilling for oil on the thirty-fifth try, and never made his fortune? What if she had never been taken from her home? And the fact that all this had happened—was it because Sam and Nancy really wanted to, because they really liked her? Or because they felt guilty?
* * *
—
INEVITABLY, SHE ACTED out. She started stealing small things to make up for the fact that she felt like she had nothing compared to everyone else. When she raided Suzy’s piggy bank, Trudy caught her, but she was not punished. This became just one more thing for Margaret to feel guilty about, to be indebted to the Garys for, and for the Garys to overlook out of a sense of generosity.
But slowly, she assimilated. After years of field trips and river trips and expeditions into the San Juan Mountains, she became a Telemark skier and an accomplished hiker and backpacker. The Kent School boys ignored her until they saw that she was a good athlete. Becoming one of the guys didn’t ingratiate her with the girls, but it was something. Her first boyfriend at Kent was someone popular enough to open doors for her socially. With him, she moved on from pot to opium, the drug of choice at Kent at the time. She tried cocaine at an Eric Clapton concert at Red Rocks. She collapsed after too many hash brownies at a Kenny Loggins show at the University of Denver.
She had sex with that boyfriend, too. After what she’d been through with Jim, this felt like an attempt to feel normal, to feel loved. She spent more energy than she admitted fending off the shame of her family’s illnesses, and trying to forget everything that Jim had done to her.
She told none of her Kent friends that one of her brothers had died, or that three others were revolving-door regulars at a mental hospital. For those secrets to remain secrets, Margaret could never explain why she came to live with the Garys. She had a stock line about the educational opportunity that Kent offered her, and how lucky she was to have that chance. Covering up the truth might have made her seem fake to some of her classmates. But it was what she needed to do to get through the day, to build some sort of life she wouldn’t feel bad about, to survive.
Hidden Valley Road was both home and not home now. Margaret’s family seemed apart from her—which relieved Margaret, even as it provoked spasms of guilt. When her parents came for visiting day, rolling past the Mercedeses in their prehistoric Oldsmobile, Margaret flushed with embarrassment. She saw her mother’s clothes differently now. She returned to Hidden Valley Road only on holidays, which tended to be the worst times to visit, with every sick Galvin boy stuck in a house together. One year, Matt had to go to the hospital with a concussion after Joe back-flipped him on the patio. When Matt’s head hit the concrete and blood started rushing, that only seemed to wind the brothers up more. With barely a pause, another fight broke out downstairs, this one forcing Don to end it. Don, of all people, who was still