Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,93

to Peter and Donald and Matt when they weren’t at home. For the first time, she started to think not just about their behavior, but the kind of medical treatment available to them.

Joe returned to Colorado Springs, joining Peter and Donald and their parents in the house on Hidden Valley Road. He was hearing voices all the time now. One night, he went running down the middle of a street downtown, screaming at the top of his lungs, “The wolves are chasing me!” It took two six-foot troopers to subdue him. He spent much of May 1982 at the state hospital in Pueblo.

Michael, the hippie alumnus of the Farm, was living nearby now, and was as shocked as everyone else by how quickly Joe had changed. He still suspected that if his brothers had a less repressive upbringing, they never would have snapped. He decided that Joe might not be so far gone yet—and that maybe he could help bring him back. He went home to see Joe and spent a night out driving with him, trying to get him to let out whatever anxieties he had, trying to reach some part of him he was keeping hidden. We need to talk. What are you doing? Why are you doing that? He took Joe to a field on the grounds of the Air Force Academy. Hey, let it out! Michael remembered saying, over and over again.

Nothing worked. His brother was unresponsive, confused, and often just mentally elsewhere. Michael thought that this must be what it was like to talk to an alcoholic—someone too tied to his current state to imagine any other way of being. He couldn’t stop thinking that mental illness was a choice, and that Joe was making the wrong choice.

If Michael was frustrated, Lindsay, back at boarding school, was surprised to find her resentment easing, her rage subsiding. Like Margaret, she had felt marginalized at her exclusive private school—but Lindsay stopped thinking that the solution ought to be to deny her family’s existence. Instead, she discovered a certain kinship with her sick brothers. They were ostracized by society. Sometimes she felt that way, too.

* * *

Margaret had traveled east in the fall of 1980 to start her freshman year at Skidmore College in upstate New York, a two-hour drive from Lindsay at Hotchkiss. At Skidmore, Margaret experienced some of the same culture shock she’d gone through at Kent and that her sister was experiencing now. Her classmates were reading the Times and the Journal every day. They could program computers and discuss seventeenth-century poetry. Margaret’s heart was in the outdoors—camping, hiking, climbing, cycling, rafting. Through a friend, Margaret got her first glimpse at the fine arts department. She knew that it had everything she wanted, yet the life of an artist was an extravagance she could not afford.

Margaret was a work-study student, serving and cleaning up after her classmates in the cafeteria. She no longer benefited from the financial cushion of being an adjacent member of the Gary family, and she was starting to realize that the last several years she had lived off the Garys’ generosity were, in some ways, an illusion. At the end of her freshman year, Margaret decided to transfer to the University of Colorado in Boulder. CU was cheap enough for her to afford on Pell Grants. She had friends there. And it was still a safe enough distance from home—too far to be a commuter, far enough that she could beg off if she didn’t feel like coming home for visits.

Every decision Margaret made was, in some way, oriented around the ability to avoid going home. Home was where Peter was urinating on the floor because a devil was under the house. Home was where Donald was still ranting and raving about his ex-wife, a decade after the divorce. Home was where Matt was cooling off, after his psychotic break at the Garys’ house. And home was where Jim was still welcome to drop by anytime he wanted.

In Boulder, Margaret was in classes with many of her old Kent friends, the rich ones who traveled to France or Portugal every summer. She did her best to have enough money to at least have fun domestically. She scooped at Steve’s Ice Cream and had a second, semiregular job dealing mushrooms