Coming Clean: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

place of all. In my bedroom there was a bookshelf, the bottom of which was always empty. When I wanted to go somewhere clean, I would curl up and lie there.
    I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up it was dark in my room. I crawled out, figuring it was about time to surrender my spot.
    “Mommy, where’s the man?”
    My mother was in the kitchen making dinner. “He left.”
    “Did he even look for me?” I was hoping that my hiding spot was so good that he finally had to give up, but I had a sneaking suspicion that that was not the case.
    “No, honey, he left a few minutes after you hid.”
    The fact that an adult would lie to me was painful. Sure, I lied all the time, but adults weren’t supposed to lie. My parents never lied.
    “It was good that you crawled up on his lap. If you were an abused child you wouldn’t have done that,” my mother told me.
    I appreciated what I assumed was a compliment but was eager to get life back to normal. “Where’s Daddy?”
    “I don’t know where your father is.” This meant that they’d fought. I didn’t know why. Aside from the CPS guy abandoning our game, I’d thought the day went pretty well. Which meant that my mom should have stopped yelling and my dad should have stopped storming off.
    “We need to talk about something, Kim.” My mom said. I was pretty sure that I was going to be in trouble. Usually when I did something bad, my mom would give me a countdown, but I would always acquiesce before she got to one. I wasn’t sure what would happen at the end of the countdown, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to find out. This didn’t seem to be that kind of trouble.
    “Do you know what that man was doing here today?” My mom was always way calmer when I was in trouble than when Dad was.
    “I lied and said Sheryl was my sister.”
    “Yes, and they believed you, which just goes to show that some people aren’t too bright. Do you know why Daddy and I were so scared this week?”
    I just shook my head. I had an idea, but I figured I’d wait for her to tell me in case I was wrong.
    “Because our house is messier than other houses, and wewere afraid that the man who came here today would take you away from us.”
    My friends lived in clean houses; I lived in a dirty one. I’d always known we were different, but until now I didn’t know that different was bad. Until now I hadn’t known that there were people who could take me away from my parents. There was something wrong with us, and now that I knew it I couldn’t unknow it. I loved my parents, and I loved my dogs, and my cats, and my panda, and my Sheryl, and I didn’t want to leave any of them. My mom didn’t have to finish the lecture.
    “I won’t tell anyone about Daddy.”

FOUR
    S HORTLY AFTER I was born, my father left the office job he shared with my mother and took a job driving a New York City bus.
    “Everyone was so happy when your father got a job with the MTA,” my mom told me. “He was such a nice guy that no one wanted to fire him, but his desk was piled so high with papers that he had to do his work on his lap.”
    I could picture that. I didn’t understand exactly what my mom did, but I knew that she was the boss and that she “pushed papers.” I imagined her with a shovel, shuttling piles of papers back and forth all day. I couldn’t imagine my father being so harsh; he loved papers more than anything.
    My mother left for work early in the morning, boarding a Manhattan-bound train before the sun came up. My dad left for his job later in the day after he had dropped me off at my babysitter, but on Thursdays and Fridays, otherwise known as Daddy Days, he was home to drive me to school. When he worked, he came home long after I had gone to bed, and my mom would wake me up in the middle of the night so that the three of us could steal a brief moment as a family. He’d pick me up and theywould sandwich me between them. Because of my parents’ incongruent work schedules, we