Crawl Space Dweller

Two bicyclists stopped mid-pedal in the center of the road. “Have you seen a strange man in the neighborhood?” the woman asked.

“No.” I tightened my grip on the dog’s leash. “What kind of strange man?”

The couple traded looks. “Really strange,” the woman said. “He had a rolling suitcase.”

I wasn’t sure how this defined strange, but I shook my head. 

“We had to call the cops on him a few nights ago,” the man said, “for starting a fire in our yard.”

That got my attention. “A fire?” 

The woman gripped her handlebars. “We think he’s homeless, and he’s going around trying to camp in backyards.”

“He ran off before the cops could find him,” the man added. “But they said to call if we see him again.”

“That’s creepy,” I said. “I’ll keep a look out.”

They waved and remounted their bikes. 

Inside, I relayed the news to my family. We ate dinner and thought nothing more about it. 

“Mom?” my daughter called from the kitchen a couple days later.

“What?”

“There’s a guy with a suitcase, like the one you told us about. And he’s climbing into Doris’s crawlspace.”

I jumped up from the couch. My husband joined us at the window. We crowded together, voyeurs peeping at our neighbor’s house. 

“That’s Doris’s grandson,” my husband said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Ninety percent sure.”

Though our neighbor’s grandson didn’t live with her, we’d met him on a handful of occasions. An aspiring actor, he spent more time smoking pot than appearing on stage. He was kind and affable, if not overly enthusiastic about my perennial butterfly bushes. But that could have been the pot. 

“He just took a pillow out of his suitcase.” My daughter offered the play-by-play.

We watched as he disappeared into the darkness. Then he pulled the door closed, leaving his suitcase outside as a talisman. 

“Strange place to take a nap.”

Over the next few hours, we revisited the window as though it were a television drama. “The suitcase is still there,” someone would call out. “The door is still closed,” someone else would report.

The conversation transferred to text when one of us had to leave the house. 

“He’s still in there.”

“It’s more than a power nap at this point.”

The crawlspace dweller provided interesting fodder. The busy activities in our own house paled as the mystery of next door took center stage. It was all we could talk about. 

“Do you think he’ll ever come out?”

“Does Uber Eats deliver to crawl spaces?”

“I wonder if he’ll still be there tomorrow.”

“What if it’s not Doris’s grandson?”

This question sat at the forefront of our minds. It was one thing to not involve ourselves in family matters. If Doris’s grandson wanted to sleep in her crawl space, it was no business of ours . . . at least not beyond rubbernecking at the kitchen window. 

But if we’d made a mistake . . . we’d only caught a glimpse of the man’s face before he disappeared into the darkness . . . That was an error with serious repercussions.

Nothing changed overnight. 

In the morning, the suitcase was still there. 

Yesterdays entertainment turned into todays what-ifs?

What if it wasn’t Doris’s grandson? What if it was Doris’s grandson and he was in trouble? What if a man climbed into our crawl space and didn’t tell us?

“Should we tell her?” I asked.

No one needed to ask who I meant.

“I don’t understand your hesitation,” my husband said. 

“It’s kind of awkward at this point. ‘Hey Doris, we watched a man climb into your crawl space yesterday afternoon, but decided to wait until today to let you know?’”

“Just tell her I noticed her crawl space light was on last night.”

I typed out my text, casually informing Doris that her crawl space light might have been left on, and there was a brown suitcase sitting outside. I left out the part where she had a crawl space dweller who may or may not be her grandson. 

“Thanks,” was all she said.

We kept returning to the window like hummingbirds to a feeder. For several hours, nothing happened. 

Then my husband received a notification of movement on the backyard security camera. “I see a walker!”

He forwarded the screenshot and we pinched the screen to zoom in. There was Doris’s backside, her face peering into the crawlspace, her hands clutching her walker. The image time stamp read twenty minutes earlier.

I ran to the kitchen. There was no sign of Doris, but the suitcase hadn’t moved.

“The door is open!”

Re-energized by the change, my girls came into the kitchen to see for themselves. 

And then . . . 

There he was. Turning the corner from the back of Doris’s house and looking very much like he’d spent a night in a crawlspace — Doris’s grandson. He made a couple trips from the crawlspace to the back door of Doris’s house and carried his suitcase inside.

The only movement was the crawlspace door blowing in the wind. 

We backed away from the window, both relieved and disappointed. The worry for Doris’s safety was gone, but so was our entertainment. 

The next day we noticed that someone had closed the door. And sitting outside, was a plastic bag, a pair of socks, and a water bottle. 

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep  us coming back to the window.