The Gift

My father built me the most wonderful doll house when I was 11. A yellow Victorian farmhouse.

It was truly lovely, magnificent, even. He covered the staircase and hallway in coffered paneling he hand made. The wrap-around porch had tiny turned spindles on the balustrades. The double-hung windows opened and closed. Together we laid a wood floor, and he showed me how to use a miniature miter box and I built elaborate period moldings.

There were four steps up to the front porch, and the space from porch to ground was covered in lattice work. Beautiful. My father insisted on putting a replica dead cat under the porch, because that was authentic, they always crawled under there to die.

Behind the gorgeous coffered panels of the staircase he also entombed a representation of a little boy. The little boy would starve to death there, for having hidden there to take a nap while he should have been working, he was unwittingly sealed in, and no one heeded his cries for help.

I begged him not to, to not leave these black marks on this gift to me. But the gift was from him, and necessarily, unavoidably, contained his ghosts of abandonment, punishment, shame. I polished the wooden floors, ran electricity through all the rooms, but neither light nor cleanliness worked as a purgation.