“The Crawlspace” by Alex McCullough

Celeste looked through the latch door drilled into the far wall of the closet, hidden away behind a mess of wrinkled mauve and fuchsia dresses she hadn’t gotten to folding, and saw a knot of blonde hair poke out of the opening, which made her yelp in shock. Violet had found the crawlspace.

“What are you doing in there, Vi?”

Violet didn’t answer. She was still small, chubby, and mute; and she would be for another few months until she hit three, and after that Celeste didn’t really know. The mere idea of a three-year-old—much less a four- or five-year-old—gave her cluster migraines. She wished Violet would stay two forever.

The little girl babbled joyfully as she scampered on her hands and knees around the barren room. It was tall enough to stand in, though Celeste had to crouch slightly to fit her neck through the door, using her hands to feel for the lightbulb wedged between the wall and the slanted ceiling. She scavenged the exposed wood floor for loose nails that might’ve caught onto Violet’s skin. Through the thin, poorly insulated walls, she felt the breeze from outside whisper gently on her arms. It was still warm outside, but November was coming, and the suitcases Celeste stored in the crawlspace would have to be covered in a plastic tarp before the winter storms swept in and the room became dank and cold with sinewy snow. She could not, for the life of her, understand what could possibly be the allure of such a room.

But Violet was content—euphoric, even—and that was all her mother seemed to notice.

So she poured stuffed animals and beanbag chairs and hand-me-down dollhouses and faux animal-fur rugs into a brand-new passion project. Violet’s father, at Celeste’s insistence, insulated the walls and sanded the jagged edges out of the wood. She tacked up a tapestry over the slanted ceiling that spanned the length of the room—a watercolor rendition of ​Starry Night​—and strung fairy lights like intricate lacework along the walls, which, when coupled with the poster, turned that tiny corner of the house into an observatory for Violet to get lost in. And when she gazed up at the painted sky and her face filled with jovial light, Van Gogh’s stars and the twinkling bulbs shined back at her.

In the crawlspace, Celeste gave Violet the gift of forever: a refuge in which she could relish the curious ventures of her tiny, voracious mind. She learned to play simple tunes on a toy xylophone; created families out of Kermit the Frog, Buzz Lightyear, and a Cabbage Patch Kid, teaching them how to behave as her own mother had; and forged an intimate love that survived within the tiny space.

And, equally as important for her as Violet’s happiness, Celeste was able to keep her paranoia at bay. For as long as Violet so loved the room, Celeste hoped she might reject everything outside it. Not that she wished disillusionment on her own daughter, but even so much as a trip to the supermarket with Violet in tow made her palms sweat, as she drowned helplessly in the fear that, should she turn her back for even a second, someone might snatch her out of the cart, and run far away; that, years later, she’d still hear that little voice crying out for help. In the crawlspace, no one—not even Celeste—could reach her little girl.

* * *

When Violet learned to walk, she stumbled her way back to the crawlspace after dinner. When she learned to read, Celeste wedged in a small bookshelf with Dr. Seuss, ​A Bad Case of Stripes​, and ​The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane​, among others. When she learned to talk, she made up stories about the stars and the moon and relayed them to her club of plush, cotton friends.

When she learned to sense when she was afraid or stressed or upset, there was a place for her to tuck herself away from all the hustle and bustle of childhood. When Celeste tried to help her learn third-grade arithmetic and how to write in cursive, Violet scrunched her face into a red knot of ire and scattered all her papers across the kitchen table, leaving her mother to clean up the mess as she stomped off to the crawlspace and stewed. But, surrounded by the stars and lights and toys and books, she remembered being two years old, when her special room bathed her in a warm calm that could temper even the nastiest of tantrums. And, as if a new girl altogether, she marched back into the kitchen and worked on her times tables with aplomb.

Celeste watched her daughter’s fascination with her little haven bloom over time, deliberating over whether it was a coping mechanism she could afford to rely on, or if Violet was merely a budding agoraphobic. She lay awake every night in bed, hearing the dull pounding of books on the floor and quiet murmuring from the other side of the wall, and imagined that her daughter might become a scholar, who took her curiosity and made it a focal point of her life; or, she might become insular, turning her crawlspace into a box to seal away the world.

Feeling her paranoia flare in a dangerous direction, Celeste decided unilaterally that she would not think about it anymore. Violet kept the crawlspace, and her mother, a room away, wrung her hands in silence.

* * *

As Violet grew older and entered middle school, Celeste fought to quell the grating shriek of worry in her head. She sat every day, curled in an armchair, cross-tabulating narratives until arriving at the worst-case scenario, and driving herself to the precipice of hysteria. What if no one likes her? What if she gets hurt? What if, God forbid, someone attacks her? What if she can’t make friends?

Only did her anxiety abate the day her daughter came home from school with a brown-haired girl named Charisma and said, “This is my friend.” Then the roaring stopped, and Celeste sighed with relief that she hadn’t made a hermit out of her curious little girl.

In the summer between middle and high school, Violet repurposed her desk across from her bed, in between two ceiling-high bookshelves, and created another enclave of sorts, where her studies became the paramount focus. She spilled the contents of her backpack onto the surface and siphoned her folders, binders, pencil case, ruler, tape, and stapler from the pile and into organized compartments.

Celeste watched in the doorway and asked her, “How did you become so organized?” “I dunno,” said Violet meekly.

* * *

Freshman year hit Violet harder than she’d anticipated. Her desk became a mishmash of biology and world history notes smothered in highlighter, thousand-page textbooks stacked like a skyline along the back, copies of ​A Separate Peace​ and ​The Color Purple​ marked up with every color pen and stamped with every color Post-It note Celeste could imagine. Violet stayed withdrawn to her room from the moment she came home to the moment she went to bed.

But she hadn’t abandoned the crawlspace; still, even thirteen years later, she felt herself gravitate towards the fairy lights and ​Starry Night​ tapestry whenever the Krebs Cycle or the Napoleonic Wars baffled her to delirious frustration. The small bookshelf now housed John Green and Suzanne Collins, ​To Kill A Mockingbird a​ nd ​Catcher in the Rye​, and, by her sophomore year, every Rick Riordan book to ever be printed. She’d replaced the toys and stuffed animals with crocheted wool blankets and a cream-colored ukelele she’d picked up at a garage sale. The room glowed under the stars that still, years later, rhapsodized her. And, after no more than thirty minutes enveloped in comfortable solitude, she was ready to resume her work.

While Celeste worried that her daughter was becoming codependent on a crawlspace of all things, she couldn’t ignore that Violet brought home straight As every semester, even in classes she never stopped whining about, and especially in classes deemed “impossible” by her peers. Celeste also couldn’t help the wan smile on her face when Violet brought up her friends, and spoke like she was entitled to them. The many nights Celeste spent worrying that she was raising a recluse were all of a sudden invalidated.

Violet even managed to find a boyfriend in spite of her unwavering dedication to coursework. Celeste supposed that every break spent in the crawlspace was just another social media hunt for companionship, or a time for her to gab with her friends about whatever teenagers talked about those days—boys, probably, though Violet reminded her mother not to assume she’d be so vapid as to obsess over ​men,​ which she said with that drawling, mocking tone Celeste hated.

Yet there he was, on the Saturday night of Homecoming weekend, with short black hair and a clean, cheerful face, standing on the doorstep with one hand holding a bouquet of sunny yellow poppies and the other waiting for Violet’s. Brandon Lim was on the soccer team, and the co-editor-in-chief of the school newspaper; Violet had mentioned all of this nonchalantly, like it was nothing, while she touched up her makeup in the mezzanine bathroom. Celeste didn’t even know she was going to the dance, let alone with a boy with whom she was apparently enamored. Before she could even get a chance to meet him, she was watching through the bay window as Violet disappeared into his car, and the two raced off towards the high school.

* * *

Three months later, the poppies died. Violet buried her face in the nape of her mother’s neck and sobbed, and Celeste held her with both arms, just like when she was a baby.

“Mom...” Violet asked, breathing heavily as the tears began to slow. “Do even the good guys cheat?”

Celeste looked the other way, at the window, for a few seconds. When she turned back, her eyes were wet. “I think so, yes.”

In the crawlspace, Violet tore down the Polaroid photos of him and shredded them over a trashcan. She tossed his Lakers hoodie into a plastic bag, along with the cheap necklace he bought her for their one-month anniversary, and a note with a borderline excessive amount of profanity and vague threats. She purged her mind, and the crawlspace, of all traces of Brandon Lim.

* * *

The rest of her sophomore year, Violet spent more and more time in the crawlspace, seeking asylum whenever titrations and Custer’s Last Stand and factorials were simply too much for her. But especially when she remembered Brandon.

Celeste believed this would be her breaking point; she’d even asked Violet, selfishly, if she’d rather take some time off from school. She’d played the part of the normal mother as long as she could, but old habits were setting back in, and the world was too wide for Violet to ever be as happy as Celeste needed. She considered pulling her from high school and all her friends, and teaching her valuable lessons about distance and distrust from the safety of their home. She hurt inside at the thought of the only thing she had left to call her own being picked apart by Brandon after Brandon after Brandon.

And Celeste was so furious she might’ve gone and pulled the plug, had Violet not turned her ugly breakup into another semester of straight As; had she not screamed herself dry of misery, sheltered under Van Gogh and the stars, before returning, sedated, to her classwork, as if nothing were wrong at all. Celeste envied her daughter’s resilience, and watched cautiously, waiting for something worse to happen, and for Violet’s compartmentalized system to crack and bleed out.

But to Celeste’s joy—and, strangely, also her chagrin—Violet held up.

* * *

There was talk of Dr. Godejohn long before Violet had made it to junior year, from fellow parents whose kids suffered through his notoriously grueling AP European History class. He was a wiry man of forty who wore loose collegiate sweaters and skinny jeans, and talked like a third-year professor at a college only Violet would be driven enough to go to, with a lilting huskiness in his voice that drew intricate narratives and startled the textbook-inured high school students who just wanted a five on the test. Fortunately, Violet loved European history, so Celeste crutched on that knowledge, though she still worried that the pressure would send her careening back to the crawlspace, and that this time she might not come out.

Miraculously, Violet superseded even Celeste’s expectations, and certainly Dr. Godejohn’s. She spent every other Study Hall in his classroom whipping through LEQs like they were nothing, and all her reading quizzes came back with impeccable scores. Violet gave an oddly banal answer to Celeste’s inquiries: “If you just do the readings, you get a good grade.”

Apparently, Violet’s friend Charisma was not of the same good fortune as Violet, for she spent day after day at Celeste’s kitchen table with tears in her eyes, wondering how she would ever face her parents if she couldn’t pass the the AP test, let alone the class.

“I just... these stupid readings are ​so​ ​long!​ ” she whimpered. “How do you not get stressed out just thinking about them?”

And Violet said something that made Celeste’s head spin.

“I take reading breaks by going to the crawlspace—I told you about that, right?” “Yeah...”

“Yeah, you basically just gotta find your own crawlspace or something like that. Something that relaxes you when you feel stressed.”

Celeste was perturbed. She didn’t know Violet ever disclosed her secret—or, supposedly, not-so-secret—hideaway to others. For so long Celeste had viewed the crawlspace as this intimate gift shared between daughter and mother: a linchpin in their relationship even as they grew apart over the years. Apparently Violet was more open about it than she realized. And, though she didn’t know why, Celeste resented that.

In spite of Violet’s advice, Charisma didn’t pass the class, nor the AP test. Celeste took just a little joy in the fact that her gift to Violet couldn’t be replicated for someone else so easily, though she feigned sympathy when Violet vented her frustrations to Celeste. Dr. Godejohn became a villain in the household, and the object of Violet’s wrath for the whole summer.

“He doesn’t have to make the class ​that​ hard, I mean– ​What​ is the point? Does he know she might not get into college because of that class? What kind of sick asshole do you have to be?!”

Celeste chose not to remind Violet that she’d not only passed, but aced the class. She was already wallowing in guilt for leaving her friend to flounder in a course she so well understood; Celeste knew better than to test her boundaries.

Instead, she asked, “Would you have passed the class without the crawlspace?”

Violet looked puzzled. “Well... I mean, yeah, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

And she stood there, in the kitchen, and fell silent, while Celeste swore she could smell something burning.

* * *

When the sirens finally stopped wailing, Celeste and Violet were standing still in the thin air, the wind whipping mockingly at their hair as they stared at the carcass of their home. The grass and soil below it were razed down to the roots, and smoke was still towering in funnels in the night sky, obscuring the stars. Neighbors gathered in clusters around the property, staring at the mother and daughter as if feeling guilty for whatever reason. Somewhere in the ashes piled around the crumbled bricks, somewhere within, were photographs, one-of-a-kind jewelry, antique portraits of Celeste’s parents, birth certificates and passports and diplomas, and everything in between; all torched and amassed in tiny mountains of black soot, or flittering above in the air.

Celeste hugged her daughter close to her, while Violet gazed into the hole bursting from the roof above the garage, where the crawlspace was. According to the firemen, a candle left lit overnight had set the Van Gogh tapestry ablaze. When the flame reached the string lights, the explosion that obliterated the whole right side of the house occurred. Systematically, one by one, Violet remembered vividly everything that was in the room: the ukelele, the beanbag chairs, the bookshelf and every book on it, the lights, the tapestry, the rug. And each and every memory of her possessions brought forth another surge of tears, spilling and freezing onto Celeste’s shirt.

“It’s all gone,” Violet whispered.

For a moment, the two were silent; it seemed that the finality of those three words was enough to capture the moment in time.

After a minute, Celeste finally responded. “No, it’s not.”

Violet looked up at her mother.

“You’ve lost nothing... until you decide you have.”

Celeste looked back at Violet, both of their eyes clouded with smoke and tears.

“Maybe you’ve lost everything you owned, and maybe those things will never come back the way they were. But you’re still ​you​, Vi. You still have your memories. And that’s all you’ve ever really had; you just didn’t know.

“And I know it hurts now, but there are ​so​ many places besides that crawlspace... to build your sanctuary.”

Celeste sighed.

“And when that too is burned to the ground, you build another one in the scorched earth, and you start all over again.”

Violet almost didn’t recognize her mother at that moment. For years she’d only known her as neurotic and terrified of loss, grieving what was taken away and holding on desperately to what remained, whether of her belongings, of her marriage, of her parents, or even of Violet. She wondered if her mother was speaking to her, or to herself, or to no one in particular.

There was still school; not the next day, of course, but after the grieving period of a burned-down home, Violet would have to return. Her teachers would feign as much sympathy as they could, but she would be expected to reassume all her old responsibilities, and then some. She had college applications and senior capstone projects and more work than she’d ever had in her life, with nothing remaining of the room she never realized she so heavily depended on. In a hotel suite somewhere in the city, she would have no starry night to gaze at when she felt overwhelmed; just a flat desk, a flat wall, a flat ceiling, and a window into nothingness.

But, maybe, there was still a sanctuary she could carve out of that scorched earth, however barren, however trivial, however small.

“So what now?” she asked, still hugging her mother’s waist. Celeste didn’t say a word.

Alex McCullough is a rising U-M sophomore from Toledo, Ohio, and is pursuing a major in English and a minor in Spanish. In his free time, he enjoys reading (and buying way too many) books, playing piano poorly, scream-singing in the car, and writing.