Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,99

they’d just seen.

* * *

—

THERE CAME A time in her sessions when Lindsay decided to talk about what had happened to her at the party in eighth grade, the night in the closet. She was vague about it at first—“there was an incident with some boys.”

Silvern knew that Lindsay had to go at her own pace. First, she needed to work through all the self-blame.

She lied to her mother. She went to a party when she shouldn’t have. Didn’t she deserve what happened next?

Come on, Silvern said. No.

Was she asking to be taken advantage of?

No, Silvern said.

Was she sending out some sort of sexual signal, as the victim of her brother’s abuse, equating sex with affection in some misplaced way? Was she asking for it?

No, of course not.

Why didn’t she just leave the closet?

Because there were three boys in there with her.

And then Silvern took a risk and used the word.

“They raped you,” Silvern said.

Lindsay was not scandalized. She was, if anything, relieved. Someone was giving what happened a name.

The defining of terms was like a glass of cold water splashed on her face. Sexual abuse was sexual abuse. Rape was rape. Being a victim was being a victim. She couldn’t escape the closet that night for the same reason that she couldn’t leave Jim’s cabin at the top of the Manitou Incline: Because someone more powerful was violating her trust, victimizing her, making it impossible for her to do anything other than what he wanted her to do.

Next came the careful unpacking of the details. Where the particulars of every incident were once completely off the table, now reciting all that dreadful minutiae was helping Lindsay regain a sense of control. The details reinforced how unrealistic some of her self-blaming notions had been. (Unrealistic, yet understandable—children usually have no way of processing trauma beyond their own experience, and so, all too often, they blame themselves.) And to articulate all of that in front of Silvern—seeing how it was possible for somebody who really cared about her to still see her strengths and respect her and know who she was, even though they knew everything about what she’d been through—was a first for Lindsay. In a way that no one in her family ever could, Silvern gave Lindsay a place where she could own her own emotions and express them on a regular basis.

Talking with her therapist about being raped by those boys was, in itself, a tremendous step for Lindsay to take. It also was a perfect dress rehearsal for what had to come next. She would have to be just as transparent with her family as she had been with her therapist. Only this time, the subject would be Jim.

* * *

They were in the car, Lindsay and her mother, going to Mimi’s friend Eleanor Griffith’s house. They pulled up to the house. They parked and walked slowly to the entrance. They saw that Eleanor was not home yet.

They were alone, mother and daughter, with a stolen moment. This was when she chose to talk about it.

Lindsay had already been opening up more to Mimi, writing her long, philosophical letters from college about the family and the illness. She wrote about what it was like to grow up around Donald, and how no one acknowledged the pain that caused her. She wrote about the state of fear she inhabited in those years. Mimi’s reaction was always the same. She would acknowledge what her daughter was saying and then urge her to move on—to forgive—always reminding her that there was someone else out there who had it worse. It was superb maternal jujitsu: paying lip service to relating to her daughter’s experience when in fact she was obliterating it, draining it of all meaning, blotting it out.

So it shouldn’t have surprised Lindsay when, standing there in front of the Griffiths’ house, she started to tell her mother that she had been sexually abused by her brother Jim countless times over several years—and her mother responded by saying that when she was a girl, the same thing had happened