Coming Clean: A Memoir (12 page)

In addition to two cocker spaniels, we had Gretchen. My big, sweet Gretchen looked vicious, but she didn’t know that. She thought she was a lap dog and would often curl all 110 pounds of herself onto the nearest warm body and wait for her ears to be scratched. When pint-sized Jewel snarled and snapped to show her dominance as the alpha of the clan, Gretchen would simply pin her down with her paws and wag her tongue and tail. It was
a game to her, and she’d never so much as nipped anything that wasn’t kibble. But, because our neighbors were scared of us, they were scared of her. To them, she was just a junkyard dog guarding the house of garbage.

Shortly after I arrived, the conversation broke up, each party returning to their own house to badmouth each other.

“We’re going to bring Gretchen to the pound,” my mother announced with dejected resolve.

“How can you just let them do this? She didn’t bite anyone!”

“I can’t, Kim. If I fought them, they’d come to the house. Why don’t you get a little rest? You must be tired.” There was no fight left in her as she leashed Gretchen and took her out to the car.

I thought that I should cry, that’s what a normal person would do, but the tears didn’t come. I was empty.

I had never thought about killing myself before. I’d always had something to live for—the future. Whenever things seemed like they were too much, I thought about how amazing my life would be one day when I was an actress. When I was onstage, playing someone else, I could experience all kinds of emotions—emotions I had spent years compartmentalizing so that they wouldn’t hurt anyone else’s feelings. I couldn’t tell my dad how ashamed he made me without hurting him, and I knew that if I cried to my mother she’d feel like a failure. Onstage, I could yell. I could scream and cry—I could let it all out, all under the guise of a character. But I wasn’t going to be an actress anymore. I couldn’t come up with the kind of money I needed to go back to Emerson in four weeks. I was stuck here, where the world was joyless and broken, where I couldn’t even have a dog to protect me from the rats.

I didn’t think “I’m going to kill myself now” when I walked to
the bathroom, but once I was there, the medicine cabinet called out to me. I grabbed a bottle of painkillers off the shelf. I felt like there was no way to leave this house—it would always drag me back. I had tried to escape, and I had failed.

I carried the bottle back to my bedroom and poured the painkillers onto the sheetless twin bed. A fistful consisted of nineteen pills; they looked so small. I used a warm bottle of Diet Pepsi that had been sitting next to my bed to swallow them in three-to-four-pill increments. Pills that small couldn’t possibly kill me. I took a few more. I left six pills in the jar in case my parents needed them later.

I lay down and traced the outline of the mattress’s design with my finger until the tears finally came.

I was scared it might be painful. I was worried about my parents. I wondered if my mom would kill herself, too. It seemed like something she might do. But then my dad would be alone. Who would take care of him?

I thought about my parents finding my body. I imagined them dragging it down the stairs and maneuvering it through the front door.

Even if we wanted to open the door and let the whole world in, we couldn’t. The piles of old clothes, shoes, papers long-rotted and mâché’d from flooding, an old plastic Christmas tree still decorated from a long-past holiday, and a still new-in-the-box air-conditioner in the foyer made it impossible to open the door more than ten inches—and even that took a good deal of force.

And so, I thought of my parents steering my body sideways, as
we had to do to get in and out, to bring me out to the front yard, where an ambulance, or maybe a hearse, could come gather me up.

I could go throw up now,
I thought.
It could still be okay.

I didn’t throw up. I didn’t want my life anymore.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I’d stopped crying and that the world was moving a little slower. I wasn’t thinking about my parents anymore, but instead focusing on the swooshing sound of the blood throbbing in my ears. It was calming, repetitive.

And then my parents came home from bringing Gretchen to the pound. Maybe I’d been right about the pills being too small, or maybe it just took more time to die. My mom came into my room to check on me and knew immediately what had happened in her absence. She’s always been like that.

“Kim, what did you do? What did you take?” She was yelling at me.

Then she started screaming for my dad, who said nothing, but robotically threw me over his shoulder, fireman-style, the way he had so many times when I was a little girl, and carried me out to the car.

Ten minutes later I was in the ER with a charcoal smoothie to suck on.

Overdosing didn’t play out in real life quite the way I had seen it on TV. No dreamy doctor stepped in and magically sucked the poison from my stomach with a pump. Instead, I had to face a bunch of seriously pissed-off nurses and a gallon of liquid charcoal.

At that particular moment, I didn’t care about the house, I
didn’t care about Gretchen, and I didn’t care about school—I just wanted my parents to leave. I couldn’t handle them looking at me like I was damaged.

They stood at the end of my hospital bed staring at me. Neither one of them said a thing—not to me, or to one another. Usually this would be the point where one of us would say something funny and break the tension. My dad would jump around like a gorilla, or my mom would make fun of one of the nurses. This time, no one said anything.

My father has never really been good at emotional situations. He’s great for discussions about metaphysical poetry and seventeenth-century British politics, but tears are outside his skill set. When I was four years old, he picked me up from my babysitter after getting a haircut. The shock of seeing him with short hair upset me so much that I cried for hours. He brought me to go get candy and promised he would never cut his hair again. And he didn’t.

As he stood there watching his daughter vomit charcoal, his long white hair pulled back into a ponytail, I could tell that he didn’t know what to do. But I didn’t want to be responsible for making my parents feel better, and so I asked them to leave. Just leave me alone in the ER to vomit my charcoal in peace.

They nodded. My dad took hold of my big toe, gave it a squeeze, and said, “You gonna be okay, kiddo?”

“Yeah, Daddy, I’ll be okay.”

He left first. My mother, always one step ahead the situation, said, “What are you going to tell them?”

“Just leave.”

My mother was right: Eventually, someone was going to ask
me why I’d done this, and I would have to tell them something. I couldn’t tell them the truth. I’d just taken fistfuls of painkillers, and I couldn’t even tell the psychiatrist why. If I did, my parents would be homeless. There was no doubt in my mind that their home would be condemned. They might even face criminal charges. So when the doctor came with his clipboard and bored look, I told him in my most vacuous teenager voice that “I was just really sad about my scholarship being revoked.”

“N
OW, DON
’
T YOU FEEL SILLY
?
” Dr. Shumacher walked into my hospital room all smiles. He had been my family doctor since my house had burned down ten years earlier.

Dr. Shumacher was a throwback to small-town living. Visits to his office for bouts of bronchitis and inhaler refills were like visiting an affable old uncle—of which I didn’t have many; our real extended family was never particularly interested in us. Stethoscope in hand, I would be questioned about my grades and after-school activities and teased about my adolescent love life—of which there was none.

“Yeah, not my brightest moment,” I responded. I wondered if he would have done something if he had known why I really swallowed all those pills. Stop seeing my parents, perhaps. Implore my father to get help, again. He had been nervous about my leaving for school. When I came in for my precollege physical, he took my parents aside and asked, “Are you going to be okay when she goes to college?” The question itself wasn’t an odd one. My parents went everywhere with me, even after I was old enough to drive myself. But from Dr. Shumacher, it was a
different kind of question. He was worried about their anxiety levels and handed them a “just in case” prescription for Xanax to help get them through the first few months of my independence.

I saw my parents sneak in behind the doctor. They had been waiting outside my room, looking for an excuse to enter under friendly terms. I had already told them I didn’t want them there, but they knew I would keep up my act in front of company.

“You know, you should enroll at Stony Brook and be a teacher. My daughter Katie is a teacher. She gets summers off, and she’s getting married.”

“Stony Brook has rolling admissions,” my mom chimed in.

“Maybe. I’m still figuring out what I’m going to do this year.” I hadn’t even started to figure out my life outside of a hospital gown, but the absolute last thing I wanted was to become a teacher or go to school on Long Island.

People were always suggesting I become a teacher. “You’ll have your summers off to act” was the usual argument, generally followed by “It’s good money and a nice life.”

At eighteen, there was only one thing in my life I was sure of: I wanted to be someone else—professionally. Any other job would mean a lifetime of being myself, and who I was wasn’t worth much.

“Well, keep it in mind. I could see you as a teacher,” Dr. Shumacher said. “I’ll come back and check on you tomorrow.”

After he left to visit his other hospitalized patients, my mother spoke first, before I could kick her out.

“I just want you to know that we rented an apartment. You never have to go back to the house.”

That wasn’t what I was expecting.

“Okay,” I replied. “When do we move in?”

“Your father and I are moving in September first. You’re going to the Netherlands,” she said. “I’ve never travelled, never left the country. I want you to have this. I cashed out an annuity. It will cover this semester, and we’ll figure out the rest later.”

My mother called Rachel shortly after I’d been admitted to the hospital. I wouldn’t let my mother stay with me, but she thought that I might let my best friend, and I think she was afraid to leave me alone in my hospital room.

Rachel was perhaps the only person who didn’t tiptoe around me, unsure of what to say or do. She trotted into my hospital room with a blanket and a pillow, pushed two chairs together, and spent each night of my hospital stay curled up on a makeshift bed. When the nurses questioned us, she said she was my sister. People always asked if we were sisters—twins on a couple of occasions—and the nurses seemed to buy our lie. While we both had long hair, blue eyes, and girl-next-door qualities to our appearances, it was our mannerisms that gave people that impression. We dressed alike, had the same vocal inflections, the same style of banter—but I was always hyperaware that I acted more like Rachel than she did me. While I struggled to fit in, Rachel had a way of knowing precisely what to do in any social situation, and I counted on her to teach me how to be whoever was necessary at any given moment.

When doctors came by, or my parents poked their heads in, hoping to be allowed in, she gracefully left my room like she had some other person to visit on the floor. A while later, she would emerge with McDonalds and casually bring up moments from
our highlight reel: my first kiss, which she dared me to have with a boy that liked me. I spent the whole time staring at her, eyes wide open, as she tried to pantomime French kissing instructions. Or she’d talk about the time I had stayed home sick from school when we had an AP biology take-home test due. We normally traded off tests, changing a few answers each time to make sure it didn’t look like we were cheating. I called the school in my most grown-up voice and said that I was her Aunt Kim and that there was a family emergency and she needed to be pulled out of class. The school secretary put Rachel on the phone, and I relayed the test answers to her before she was due in Dr. Sullivan’s class. All the while she made understanding
oh
s and
aww
s while filling in her Scantron in front of the front office staff. Or the time we went to TGIFriday’s and our waiter was so enamored with her he forgot to bring me my soda or food, until she finally ordered for me.

She had somehow made a week in the hospital, getting blood drawn between psych evaluations, seem like any other sleepover.

I asked Rachel not to tell Anna about my suicide attempt, at least not until I was out of the hospital. I felt stupid and dramatic and didn’t want anyone else feeling awkward around me, plus Anna had been spending the summer with her grandmother, and I didn’t want her to feel like she had to take me in.

When I left the hospital, I didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t go back to Rachel’s house, and I refused to go back home.

I scheduled as many security guard overnight shifts as I could, and the nights I was off I slept in my car. The 1988 Pontiac Grand Am was my safe place. I was meticulous about its upkeep, vacuuming it daily and changing air fresheners monthly so that it always smelled good. I parked my car in my favorite place
each night, Peppermint Park. It was a tiny playground across the street from the restaurant I worked at, the place I went when I wanted to be alone. During the day I would sit in my car watching the kids play, and at night I would swing alone on the swings or curl up in the backseat with the pillow and blanket I kept in the trunk.

My father settled right back into his happy-go-lucky self when I left the hospital, content to chalk up my overdose as something else to forget ever happened. My mother couldn’t let it go as easily. She was overly careful and accommodating around me, afraid to touch me or say anything that might be upsetting. They made a practice of stopping into the restaurant for dinner almost every night to make sure I was there, but they never questioned my sleeping arrangements. I told them I would never go back to their house, and so they assumed I was at Rachel’s. I didn’t want them to know I was sleeping in my car. When they lingered at the front of the restaurant before leaving to say good-bye, I would act extra-peppy and tell them everything was fine.