DONALD
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
MARK
MATTHEW
PETER
MARGARET
LINDSAY
CHAPTER 40
On the blazing July day before his mother’s funeral, Peter’s room at Riverwalk—a nursing home, a few blocks away from the state mental hospital in Pueblo—had a cheap boom box blaring classic rock and a big-screen TV going full blast, both of which Peter largely ignored.
“It’s wonderful,” Peter said, looking around, Lindsay standing next to him. “I got the Bible and everything.”
He showed off a photo album, filled with group shots of the Galvins. He pointed at faces and picked out names.
“Don, Jim, John, Brian, Robert, Richard, Joseph, that’s me, Peter, Mary’s in the chair,” he said, jabbing at the photo with a shaky index finger. “They’re wonderful. That’s my dad. He was a lieutenant colonel in U.S. Air Force. He flew the falcons at the Air Force football games. The Thunderbirds were at halftime….Don, Jim, John, Brian, Robert, Richard, Joseph, Mark, Matt, and that’s me, Peter. Margaret, Mary”—he smiled—“that’s my little girl, Mary. She’s wonderful.”
“You know, Peter, could you bring that with you?” Lindsay said.
“Yeah, yeah. I think I should, I think I should and cooperate, with the Bible. I love you!”
“Jeff is going to come pick you up tomorrow morning,” Lindsay said. “We’re just going to go have lunch today.”
“Can I go with you for lunch?”
Lindsay laughed. “Sure!” This, of course, had been the plan all along.
Peter was beyond thin now—bony, his pants cinched in order to fit him. He had emerged from his room to meet his sister smiling, wearing a hockey jersey, a plaid flannel bathrobe, a ratty ski jacket, a baseball cap, heavy work boots, and winter gloves. His voice was low and gravelly, his mustache scraggly. But he still had his same puckishness, dampened only a little by exhaustion from shock therapy. Lindsay’s visit happened to land on a Tuesday, and Peter had just returned from his weekly ECT at the hospital.
When Peter wasn’t on a tirade, claiming his doctors were working for Satan, those same doctors found him as charming as always, even sweet. “He’s the only patient I’ve ever gone that far out of my way where I would take him for walks,” said one of his doctors, Matt Goodwin, who treated him for years when Peter lived full-time at Pueblo, and who still often administered his ECT sessions. “I would take him out for lunch.” On the wards, Peter would serenade patients and doctors with his recorder, playing “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” and “The Long and Winding Road.” Every Christmas, he’d take out the photo of his family on the staircase at the Air Force Academy, showing everyone who was who, and talk endlessly about flying falcons with his father.
In 2015, Goodwin had petitioned the court controlling Peter’s care to compel El Paso County, where the city of Pueblo is located, to make a space in one of its local assisted living facilities available to Peter. As long as he had ECT on a regular basis, Goodwin argued, Peter had no need to live inside the state mental hospital. A month later, on December 17, Peter moved to Riverwalk, which primarily serves people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Peter was by far the youngest resident there. His diagnosis: bipolar 1 and psychosis. His prescriptions: the mood stabilizer Depakote; Zyprexa, an antipsychotic; and Latuda, an antidepressant often prescribed to bipolar patients.
At Riverwalk, Peter liked to keep to a schedule. His smoke breaks had to happen at a certain time. If they didn’t, he’d get agitated. “It’s something for him to do out of the monotony of the day,” a supervisor at Riverwalk said. “It gives him an activity.” He was never violent or aggressive, though he could sometimes be loud and persistent (“You said you were going to get my cigarettes!”). He often played his recorder at a long-term care facility across the street, where the patients applauded him and asked for more. He’d play there every day if they let him.
For their lunch outing, Lindsay coaxed Peter into losing the bathrobe. It was the middle of summer. The treatment had depleted Peter. He hadn’t eaten since the night before. But he was excited to leave with Lindsay. “I think I’m gonna get a big thirty-eight-ounce Coke,” he said. “I want to get a cup of coffee. I like coffee….I shampooed all my hair and got everything all cleaned up and put socks on and new shoes and new underwear….Hey, can’t we stop and get a pack of cigarettes? I want to stop and get a pack of cigarettes with a five-dollar bill.”
What does he think about ECT?
Peter’s expression darkened. “They knocked me out. They knocked me out cold with oxygen.”
How does he feel afterward?
“I just cooperate fully and do everything that they say.”
On the way out, Peter stopped in the lobby, pulled out his recorder, and performed a Christmastime favorite—“Angels We Have Heard on High”—before walking stiffly out the door.
“I want to go get a burger!” he said in the backseat of Lindsay’s SUV. He flashed cash from his wallet. “I got all the money. Twenty-five dollars, right here.”
“That’s all right, I’ve got it,” Lindsay said.
“Okay, I’ll cooperate fully.”
“So it’s going to be a big crowd tomorrow, Peter,” Lindsay said.
“Yeah, it will be.”
“Do you have something nice you can wear?”
“Yep.”
“All of Mimi’s grandkids and great-grandkids will be there.”
“I’m going to go smoke! I wish I could have gotten cigarettes.”
“After lunch we can go get some cigarettes.”
They pulled up at a pub in downtown Pueblo, where Peter ordered a large Coke and a burger with fries and ketchup, tearing through the fries first. Some Riverwalk employees noticed him from across the room and walked over to say hello, smiling and asking how Peter was feeling today.
“So who were they?” Lindsay asked, once they returned to their table.
“I don’t know,” Peter said.
“Were they from the hospital?”
Peter did not answer.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“No. I’m sick of everything that I went through. I want to get a pack of cigarettes and cooperate. I’ll go buy it myself and cooperate with you in full to do everything you want me to. Just don’t smoke ’em. I’ll smoke ’em myself….I can’t eat this ketchup with cheese. I think I have an upset stomach. The ketchup makes me feel funny….I’m cooperating full. I want to cooperate—do anything for you that I can.”
AFTER LUNCH, LINDSAY pulled up to a store and let Peter out to get cigarettes by himself, giving her a moment to speak openly about his condition. “Dr. Freedman explained it to me,” Lindsay said. “Years and years of overmedicating. That’s why they do these ECTs, because the medications really don’t work for him.” This was a version of the same problem all her sick brothers had. The less consistently you take the medication, the worse off you were—the more psychotic breaks you have, the more far gone you become. It was a painful catch-22 to witness a loved one experience: Not taking the drugs makes them more sick, and then taking them, in some cases, makes them sicker. A different kind of sick, she agreed, but sick nevertheless.
“He said eventually the medications will have no more impact,” Lindsay said. “And it’s really the ECTs that have caused the majority of the memory loss. This is more disorganized thinking. Not able to answer questions. And the mantra—I cooperate fully—is constant.”
That saying, so specific, must have some meaning to Peter. All those years of parents and doctors telling him he was not cooperating, Lindsay said—maybe they’ve made a mark on him.
Peter hopped back in the car, smiling. “God, that’s fast in there. I’ve got a whole pack. Can I light one up in here?”
“No!” Lindsay said cheerfully.
“Okay,” Peter said, then muttered: “I’ll cooperate fully.” A moment later, he brightened again. “I have a whole pack of Marlboros. You people are wonderful.”
Lindsay’s next stop that day, Matt’s home at the Citadel Apartments in Colorado Springs, was a small, no-frills place paid for with a Section 8 housing voucher. Never one to focus on his personal hygiene, Matt nevertheless maintained his home like the tidiest of hoarders, his towering piles of stuff always neat and organized. “I bet he’s got a fortune in collectible vinyl,” said Lindsay as she pulled into the parking lot.
Matt’s most prized collection was his stack of Clint Eastwood movies—DVDs and VHS tapes. Most of the time, when Matt was on the phone with his family, A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly could be heard blasting in the background. “I told him that Clint Eastwood is Republican,” Lindsay said, smiling. “That was very disappointing to him.” But he still watched all the movies.
Visits and phone calls with Matt were never predictable. Sometimes he’d rage about being labeled mentally ill, about his mother putting him on medication, about the millions of dollars he said the government owed him for building all of the roads and bridges in the state of Colorado, about how the mental health profession had killed his father and two of his brothers, Jim and Joe. “They might as well kill me!” he’d moan—he had nothing left to live for. But today, the day before his mother’s funeral, Matt was in a decent mood—not delusional, just glum, and, as usual, a little caustic. He’d been watching Hang ’Em High when Lindsay showed up. In jeans and a leather biker vest, he was a little imposing, tall and stout with unruly long hair, a scraggly beard, and the same deep-set eyes as his brother Donald. Lindsay’s kids, whenever they saw him, always remarked on how much he looked like Hagrid. Even his voice was a low, mumbly growl.
“Well, my shoulder couldn’t get any worse than what it is,” Matt said, sinking into the backseat of the SUV.
“You’ve got a doctor’s appointment, though!” Lindsay said, triumphantly. Seeing doctors had never appealed to Matt. For years, Lindsay had been trying to get him to get his teeth fixed, but he thought the dentist would implant something in his head.
“I’ve got an appointment over at Park View on the tenth of August,” he said, and then he started running through other old business, concerned about tying up loose ends from his accident with the truck—the one Lindsay had been helping him with just before Mimi’s death. Matt actually had been in the middle of a good deed when the crash happened. He was helping his friend Brody, a Vietnam vet who is a paraplegic, get to Denver to get a new bag for his catheter. They were on their way back during rush hour on a Friday night when Matt saw a car stopped in the center lane and slammed his brakes. He missed that car, but then the two cars behind him smashed into him, one after the other.
“They sent me a letter from the impound lot, saying it cost eight hundred and fifty dollars?”
“I know,” said Lindsay. She had spent hours on the phone with the police and the courts and the insurance company, sending copies of the power of attorney document that Matt had signed to show that she could handle everything on his behalf. “If they call you or anything, or write another letter, give it to me.”
“I just want to sort that out.”
“We will. It’s gonna take a long time, though, Matt. The courts, they haven’t even assigned a permanent case number to it yet.”
Lindsay tried to bring up tomorrow’s funeral, just as she had with Peter. Matt also didn’t pick up on that. Instead, over a sandwich at a nearby sub shop, he ran through a litany of his many injuries and wounds. “I had six separate teeth surgeries. And I had a blot clot removed from my brain in 1979, I was twelve and a half.”
“I was at that hockey game,” Lindsay said.
“It was at the Air Force Academy,” he said. “It was the league championship. We beat Mitchell. They had twenty-two players, two goalies, and a coach. We had eleven guys. You know what you say about hockey? Go puck yourself.”
Lindsay smiled. She was used to Matt’s jokes. Most were dirtier.
“Our team went to state,” he said. “But I couldn’t play because I broke my face. This guy picked me up under my butt and threw me into the boards.”
“I remember!” Lindsay said. “I sat next to you in the backseat of the car and your eyeball was hanging out of your face.”
He showed Lindsay a scar on the side of his face.
“I got a hundred and fifty-seven stitches,” Matt said, launching into his usual exaggerated version of the story. “I flatlined and they used the shockers. You know that ER show, with the shockers? They hit me ten times, and I flatlined for seven and a half minutes, and they said do it one more time. The eleventh time they hit me, they got a pulse, and I woke up two and a half weeks later.”
He reminisced a little about his college days at Loretto Heights—girls in the dorms, Frisbee in the hallways, all the hockey players he knew there. He remembered dropping out after a year and working at the bowling alley and having a newspaper route and living with his brother Joe for a while.
“When Joe died, me and Mark and Mike went out there and divided his stuff between the three of us,” he said somberly. “I got his TV.”
The subject of Joe propelled him into more difficult territory. “Donald just made my life a nightmare,” Matt said. “He took his anger out on the whole family. He smacked me across the floor.” The more he talked about his childhood, the more he descended into self-pity. It was never far from Lindsay’s mind that Matt—who had once been the coach of her soccer team; whom she once wrote an essay about, calling him her hero—really was a victim, just as she was.
“Donald, Brian, Jim all abused me,” Matt said—though, given this was Matt talking, there could be no way of knowing how true that was. “So I left the family for like eight or ten years. And I came back, and Jim had a heart attack, over there at Main Street. And Joe had a heart attack. And my dad died. And then my mom died. And I lost my family. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’m here,” Lindsay said.
Her brother glanced at her. “It’s good to see someone still here.”
That night, Mimi’s house on Hidden Valley Road received a host of Galvins who had come to town for her funeral. Michael drove in from Manitou Springs with his wife, Becky, and one of his daughters; he was still unpacking the experience of taking care of Mimi as she left this world. “I told Mary that taking care of somebody like that, it’s really a privilege,” Michael said. “Because if you had to do it, you would. But because there’s enough money, most of us don’t have to.”
“Hey, sunshine!” John said, spotting Michael.
John, the music teacher, now retired, had come down from Idaho with Nancy—their first time back at the house since his mother’s ninetieth birthday, three years earlier.
Michael brightened. “Hi, there he is!” The two brothers hugged. “I think you shrunk a couple inches, buddy.”
“Well, maybe a little bit,” John said.
“No, I’m sure you did,” Michael said. “You were always taller than me, weren’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” said John. He’d fallen off a ladder two years earlier and endured a long, painful recovery. “Three back surgeries, four knee surgeries, three ankle surgeries. I was one step above an invalid for the last two years.”
“Hey, I got some ladder work if you want to do it,” Michael said with a smile.
John and Nancy had come to town in their RV, a retirement splurge. Entering their golden years in Boise, they had some creature comforts now: an antique piano they meticulously restored themselves, a koi pond in the backyard, and a small arbor where they grew grapes for wine they made in small batches and labeled. They used the RV to travel the country, making trips to Colorado somewhat more feasible. But they had built a life apart from the Galvins, in part by design and in part, they said, by necessity. “Margaret and Mary have probably taken the brunt of all of it as far as taking care of those who are mentally ill and seeing to their needs,” John said. “And they have the money to do that.”
Now that he was here, John was already feeling a little put out. He had rehearsed a piano piece for his mother’s service, only to learn he would not be able to play it. Lindsay had planned a gathering outside, in a meadow. He’d wished they’d put together something more formal for his mother—even though rationally he understood that he had no real right to feel that way, given that the timing of the funeral was arranged around his previously scheduled visit to Colorado Springs. Still, it was unsettling, not the closure he wanted. John found himself in a narrative that was unfamiliar to him, one he could not control. This is the way it works, a lot of the time. If you’ve left town, like John, you can hold on to your truth. To come home is to run the risk of being contradicted. Even the people who leave, like John, can feel almost rejected.
John decided a long time ago to live his own life the best he could, but he never saw a role for himself in caring for his brothers. “I try to see Matthew and Peter if they’re available when I go down there, maybe once a year,” he said. “But my oldest brother, Donald, well, you couldn’t have a conversation, basically.”
MATT DECIDED NOT to come to dinner; he had fared well enough during lunch earlier that day with Lindsay, but seeing everyone at Hidden Valley Road seemed difficult for him. Peter was not invited to dinner; for him to mix and mingle with family the night before the funeral seemed like too much—too exhausting for him and everyone around him. But the next day, both Matt and Peter would be at the funeral, Matt skulking in the background, sweating uncomfortably, and Peter beaming in front of everyone, the closing act of the service, playing “My Favorite Things” on his recorder to a round of applause, and then, for an encore, reciting a rambling, customized version of the Nicene Creed: “I believe the one God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth….”
Mark Galvin came in from Denver for the funeral-eve dinner—the eighth son, the onetime hockey star and chess prodigy, and now the youngest Galvin brother who was not mentally ill. Bald with a goatee and a wide frame, Mark resembled no one else in the family, except perhaps in the way he talked. He and John and Michael all spoke high-mindedly about politics and music and chess—cultured in the fashion their mother had always hoped. He had retired from managing the university bookstore—a state job with a pension that he’d started collecting. In his retirement, Mark had turned his car into a private taxi service, doing regular business at two of the fanciest hotels in Boulder, the St. Julien and Boulderado. This new career had caused him to cross paths with some people that Mimi would have loved to hear about, like the artistic director of the Boulder Philharmonic, who hired Mark to take her guest artists to and from the airport. “I’ve got tickets to Vivaldi in January,” Mark said. “I’m driving Simone Dinnerstein”—the world-class pianist—“back to the airport from Boulder, after getting free tickets in exchange.”
Mark had felt alone in his family for decades now, the other hockey brothers dead or sick. Some days his entire childhood seemed like a blank to him—an impulse to move on, perhaps, or to stop hurting. A few of the more vivid memories, however, hadn’t faded. Mark had an excellent recall of the massive blowup between Donald and Jim on Thanksgiving, forty-five years earlier—and Donald picking up the dining room table and throwing it at Jim. “A madhouse,” Mark said, shaking his head.
OF THE WELL siblings, only Richard and Margaret didn’t come to the dinner on Hidden Valley Road. Richard seemed to be avoiding a confrontation. He had recently launched an email salvo against Lindsay over the subject of Mimi’s will, arguing that Lindsay should not be the executor, only to get pushback from all the other well siblings, who came to Lindsay’s defense.
In Lindsay’s opinion, Richard was just upset not to be included in the will. Lindsay said that Mimi had made the decision to leave him out only because Richard had already accepted money from Don and Mimi several years earlier, to help him through a rough patch. “My father couldn’t stand Richard,” she said. She could not deny, though, that Mimi had thought the world of Richard, laughing and gossiping with him whenever he visited. “She would play us against each other to get what she wanted,” Lindsay said. “That’s a trait I have to work very hard not to have.”
When Michael used to watch Richard cozy up to Mimi this way, he’d almost laugh. “He wants so much to be like his father and feel on top of the world,” he said. “I think he tries too hard.”
To hear Richard tell it—over lunch one day, a few weeks later—he clashed with Lindsay because it seemed to him that all she ever wanted to discuss was the sick brothers. “I got so upset. I said, ‘Mary, I want one dinner to talk about the moon, the stars and the skies without talking about mental illness.’ It just became so depressing for me.”
Richard seemed to take more after his mother than his father, determined to speak about pleasant subjects only, like his trips to Pebble Beach and Cabo, and his business deals in Dubai. Like Mimi, Richard also was convinced of the value of having a pedigree, being raised from good stock. This much was clear when he told stories about his father that were unlike any that anyone else in the family told. In Richard’s version of his father’s life, Don Galvin wasn’t the second-in-command of the USS Juneau—he was the captain. Don Galvin wasn’t just a briefing officer at Ent Air Force Base—he had a personal relationship with President Eisenhower. Don Galvin wasn’t just the first executive director of the Federation of Rocky Mountain States—he founded it. Don Galvin didn’t get his Father of the Year award from the Knute Rockne Club—the award came directly from President Nixon. Don Galvin wasn’t just the president of Colorado Springs’ local ornithological group—he “brought Audubon to the West.”
And Don Galvin wasn’t just a communications officer at NORAD. “Dad was in OSS,” Richard said, “which became the CIA.”
Richard would talk at length about covert missions his father took to Iceland, Ecuador, and Panama, all while using his jobs at the Academy and NORAD as covers. All this, Richard said, he’d gleaned from conversations with his mother. “She just said there were things that he could never say,” he said.
The idea that Don Galvin was a spy is unsubstantiated by any available information from any military branch or intelligence agency. And yet this romantic view of his father was helpful to Richard. At the very least, it was preferable, for instance, to the story of a father whose military career stalled out—perhaps because he’d harbored the liberal political views of an academic, not the hawkish view of a military officer—and who gritted his teeth after being demoted to service as a glorified PR man.
Rather than think of Don Galvin that way, Richard adopted a convenient self-delusion. Not the sort of delusion that fits a DSM criterion. But we all have stories we tell ourselves.
MARGARET HAD TOLD Lindsay that she didn’t want to spend the night at the house—that she’d rather come in for the funeral the next morning with Wylie and her two girls. Once again, Lindsay felt abandoned. She was not sure what to do with that feeling. Most of the evening, she didn’t discuss it—until, in the kitchen, John turned to Lindsay.
“So. Margaret’s not here.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Lindsay said.
“What’s the problem?”
Lindsay took a few seconds, not sure how measured to make her response.
“I think it’s Margaret’s overwhelming guilt,” she said finally, “at not having lifted a fucking finger for, like, ever.”
“Yeah, she’s into her own thing,” John said, treading lightly.
“She is into her own thing,” Lindsay said, and her smile widened. “Actually, there you go! That is the explanation.”
LINDSAY WALKED OUTSIDE to the patio and hugged Michael and Mark. There was talk of who had RSVP’d for the funeral and if the clear weather would hold long enough before an expected rainstorm. Then the reminiscing started—the epic road trip the family took across the country for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York; the luggage flying off the roof when Dad misjudged the clearance of an A&W restaurant drive-through; all the luggage coming into the car, jammed in with the kids and the birds.
“Didn’t he drive off the road in Kentucky in another rainstorm?” Mark asked.
“Yeah,” said John. “And in the rainstorm a rock hit the truck, the bus. And then he had to take it to New Paltz, New York, to a repairer-dealer. He dropped the screw into the rotor. The mechanic found the screw in the rotor.”
“I remember the rainstorm,” Michael said, “but I don’t remember the other stuff.”
“You don’t remember the rock hitting the van?” said Mark. They all laughed.
“Who the hell keeps falcons?” Lindsay said. “Every time I tell people, they’re like ‘What?’ ”
“I tell people stories in the cab all the time,” Mark said.
John turned to Lindsay, suddenly serious, thinking about the funeral.
“What’s plan B if it rains?”
“Umbrellas,” Lindsay said. “If it rains, John, you can play at the restaurant.”
“The keyboard’s electronic,” John said. “It’s just not the same.”
Lindsay smiled and motioned over to the piano that Mimi had still kept at the house. “I’ll try to convince them to take the piano up from the basement and out to the field.”
There was more laughter.
DONALD WAS ALONE in the living room, away from the others, smiling politely at anyone who smiled at him. Today happened to be his seventy-second birthday, and Lindsay had asked Debbie to get him a cake as a surprise. But he kept to himself, mostly silent, until he was asked if he’d had a chance to say goodbye to his mother.
“Yes, when she first left,” Donald said. “She said, ‘Thanks.’ I said, ‘Thanks,’ back to her. I just thanked her for being there.”
Will he miss her?
“No,” Donald said. “She’s bred. She’s out of harm. I mean, she’s at sea right now, as a triplet.”
His mother is a triplet?
“I bred her as a triplet, at sea right now.”
As a human being, or as a fish?
Donald scowled, finding the question ridiculous. “As a human.”
But she’s at sea?
“Yeah,” Donald said. “They live with an octopus.”
A human lives with an octopus?
“Yes. Octopuses have the ability to make man. To make many humans, all animals. When the flood comes, then they keep them alive in the water sometimes.”
And Mimi is there, as a triplet?
“Yeah. She’s a little one right now. A little baby. She’s out there, maybe five months old today.”
Would you like that to happen to you when you die?
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind,” Donald said.
JUST BEFORE IT was time for Donald to return to Point of the Pines, they brought out the cake: chocolate with cut-up chunks of a Snickers bar on top. Donald had been so quiet all evening that he was almost not there, a shadow. But he seemed pleased by the attention now, smiling softly, his lips never parting.
Debbie lit the candles and brought the cake out to the patio where everyone was sitting—the same patio where they’d once kept Frederica and Atholl, and where Matt’s head slammed to the ground in a battle with Joe. As everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Donald—the oldest person in the room now, the paterfamilias—stood over the candles and broke out into a wider smile. Then he crossed his arms across his chest and closed his eyes, as if he were making a wish.