The Baby on the Doghouse
Nine-year-old Sherry Gallagher opened her eyes in the darkness, but her heart remained in the dream, as heavy and sodden as a towel soaked in a mud puddle. It was a dream that had revisited her every so often for a long, long time. In it, she is a baby, old enough to sit but not to walk, and she is sitting on the roof of the doghouse in their backyard. She has no idea how she got up there. But there she sits, clothed only in a cotton diaper fastened with safety pins, looking forlornly across the yard at the lighted kitchen window where her mother stands, doing the dishes. As she gazes toward the house, there is a flash of lightning, a slow roll of thunder, and a cold rain begins to fall. Sherry gasps as it hits her skin. Then her eyes widen, her chin puckers, and, dissolving into misery, she balls up her baby fists next to her baby cheeks and lets out a loud baby wail. At the window, her mother looks up for the first time. Her eyes rest on Sherry for a moment, but they register no concern; then she returns matter-of-factly to the dishes.
Sherry had always woken from this dream feeling unutterably sad. And a little guilty, too. Even though her mother had died two years before, the dream still felt somehow disloyal to her because, after all, she had never been heartless—just busy. And tired. With Sherry’s four older brothers and sisters, her mother had constantly been wrestling mountains of laundry, cooking (and burning) meals, scouring dried food off plates and burned crusts from the bottoms of pans, and yelling at kids to hurry up and get dressed or they would miss the bus. It wasn’t that she hadn’t cared; it was just that she hadn’t had time.
When Sherry was little, her mother sometimes read fairy tales to her at bedtime from The Golden Book of Fairy Tales. Sherry loved those stories so much that, when she learned to read, she started reading them to herself from the beloved book with the beautiful illustrations so often that she practically had them memorized. She liked to imagine herself as Cinderella or Rapunzel and would make up fairy tales to narrate her own days. Her oldest sister, Clara, who had come to help with the kids for a couple of months after their mom died, would become a wicked stepmother who made her sweep the crumbs from under the table for hours on end until poor Cinderella would escape to hide at the tip-top of the ladder tree on the side on her house, where her evil taskmaster would never think to look. Or her dad would become a giant, roaring troll when he came up from the basement mad about some little thing, smelling of beer, his shouts slurred and indistinct, and she and her fellow billy goats would have to run and hide.
Hiding was Sherry’s superpower. She was very good at it. She could squeeze into surprisingly small and unexpected places—not just under beds and behind the hanging clothes in a closet, but in kitchen cupboards, behind the water heater, and out the dormer window of her little attic bedroom to the house’s shingled roof. She was always on the lookout for new places to hide because, in her house, you never knew when you would need one.
