Read Coming Clean: A Memoir for Free Online

home.
    I knew that if we could escape the papers we could be happy.
    George Burns finally got around to me on February 14, 1989. It was a Wednesday, and I had woken up naturally, without tickling or blinking lights. My father was nowhere to be seen, and my first thought when I realized I had slept until 10 a.m. was that I would miss the Valentine’s Day party my second grade class was throwing.
    I rushed out of my room, ready to protest the loss of candy his tardiness had cost me, when I heard my mom. She should have been at work, but she was yelling at someone on the phone in her bedroom.
    She looked up at me in her doorway just as she was slamming the phone down.
    “Kimmy, what are we going to do with your father?” she said, motioning for me to sit on the bed next to her. She asked me that a lot, and I knew it didn’t need answering.
    “Your father was in an accident,” she told me. “Part of the bus he was driving last night came loose and hit him on the head. He’s hurt, but he’ll live. He’s driving home now.”
    I followed my mom to the kitchen and leaned against the refrigerator as she made me breakfast—toast with a hole in the shape of a heart, for Valentine’s Day, with an egg cooked sunny-side up in the middle. As she cooked, she filled me in on the details of the accident. While driving, the Plexiglas visor in the front of his bus had swung loose, hitting him in the head once, then swung back to hit him again. When he started feeling dizzy and nauseous, he told his passengers that he was going express to the bus yard and drove himself to the nearest hospital. The doctors told him that he probably had a concussion. Since there was nothing but rest that could heal him, he decided to drive the two hours back to Long Island and rest at home.
    I was more upset about not being on the receiving end of Valentine’s Day cards and candy than I was about my father. I couldn’t imagine that getting hit on the head by a visor would cause much damage.
    I was wrong. When Daddy came home, he was different. What started as a day of sleeping in turned into weeks and then a month. There didn’t seem to be enough rest in the world to make him better. My mother told me he was having migraines. He didn’t want to watch TV or go to the pond anymore; he just wanted to be left alone. His moods were unreliable, and I never really knew which Daddy I was going to come home to. Sometimes he would get mad for no reason at all and punch his fist through a wall, and seconds later he would throw me over his shoulder and spin me around like he used to before the accident.More often, though, he seemed completely indifferent to everything and anyone.
    Instead of working he would go to doctors’ appointments. We were told that he had Post Traumatic Brain Injury Syndrome—which my mom said meant that the doctors had no idea why he hadn’t fully recovered from the concussion. I had the feeling he wasn’t really sick anymore, but that he’d finally wandered off like I had always been afraid of; his body just hadn’t gone anywhere.
    I didn’t think much of it when my mother announced at the end of April that we would be moving to the Bronx, just the two of us, to take care of my grandmother. Grandma had developed gangrene in her foot, which my mother informed me meant that her foot was rotting, and we needed to clean it regularly so that she wouldn’t have to get it cut off.
    I learned years later from my aunt Lee that my mother’s story was only partly true. My grandmother did have gangrene in her foot, but her ailment coincided with yet another visit from CPS. This time there was no mistake—they were not called about the unfair treatment of dolls in our household. A neighbor had reported the conditions of our house. The mess was worse than it had ever been—our beds, toilet, and tub had become the only visible surfaces left—and my father didn’t want to do anything but sleep. Faced with the fact that she couldn’t clean