“Did you do that?”Ĭarlotta did not answer. “Carlotta!” they both exclaimed together, when they saw the trampoline, and the stepladder, and their daughter wobbling at the top of it, her head inside the ceiling.
It was at this inopportune moment that her parents decided to come back in from the garden. She balanced it on the trampoline, and climbed it, and peeked again through the hole in the ceiling.
Then, shaking the plaster out of her hair, she fetched a wobbly stepladder from the broom closet. She went quickly to the window and peered out to make sure her parents were still busy. Sanctuary: that was the word that always popped into her head when she thought of her mission. She was always looking for secret places, always looking for small, quiet corners in the great, bleak expanse of the world. She imagined herself as one of those feral children from books, haunting her family with frightening cackles and knocks. She dreamed of tunnels worming among the beams and air ducts, secret chambers and quiet corners where she could hide. She had the idea she would find animals there – mice or birds or rattlesnakes – that liked to be alone as much as she did, and paradoxically, that they would want to be her friends. She had seen it for a split second, a hidden world squeezed between the downstairs and the upstairs, and it had not looked bad at all. She was not hurt, only a little stunned, but it awakened in her the great wish to go back into the space between the floors and crawl about in it. Then she fell back down and bounced several more times on the shiny black material, staring up at the hole she had made with her head.
She smashed through the ceiling and hung for a moment, her head among the mouse droppings and plaster of the crawlspace, her legs kicking in the room below. Then she leaped up and came down with all her weight and was hurled high into the air. She bounced on it cautiously at first, small, exploratory bounces. Once her parents were outside in the garden, she approached the trampoline slowly, the way one might approach a bear in the woods when one is not sure if it is dead or only sleeping. “So it doesn’t blow away,” they said, and Carlotta watched from around a door-frame and thought about how she might use this turn of events to her advantage. When autumn came, Carlotta’s parents brought in the trampoline from outside and set it up in the living room.
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