The Pumpkin House Read online

  Ronnie didn’t think they’d even begun to chip away at his curiosity about Old Notch-foot. “What happened to your leg?”

  “Oh, it’s just an old injury.” Mr. Keenan rubbed his leg and grinned. “A constant reminder of how rash and foolish I was in my youth.”

  Before Ronnie could ask for specifics, Sarah came riding her bike down the road. When she reached the house, she hopped off her bike and dropped it onto the ground rather than her usual habit of leaning it neatly against the side of the porch.

  “Sorry I’m late. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

  Ronnie could immediately tell something was wrong with Sarah. She wasn’t her normal cheerful self and hadn’t even said hello to them. Mr. Keenan must’ve sensed it too because he remained silent, avoiding asking her if anything was wrong.

  “You’re not late,” Ronnie offered, trying to make her feel better. “I just got here earlier than usual.”

  “Well, let’s get to work.”

  Without waiting for a response, Sarah stomped off to the back of the house. Ronnie tentatively rose out of the rocking chair to follow after her. As he rounded the side of the house, he glanced over at Mr. Keenan, who had a confused and worried look on his face.

  Once Ronnie got around back, he discovered Sarah had already decided she was going to check off names first today. He walked over to the table, grabbed the black Sharpie, and then went over to their assigned jack-o’-lanterns to complete for the day.

  “Who’s first on the list?” Ronnie asked, half-expecting her to blow up at him.

  Much to his surprise, Sarah calmly read the first name off the list to him as if nothing was bothering her. They worked for about half an hour without saying a word, an awkward silence which was the exact opposite of the relaxed way they had felt around each other ever since the first day.

  Finally, Ronnie couldn’t stand it anymore. Sarah acted like she was fine, but he could tell something was still bothering her. He cared about her too much to let it go without at least trying to talk to her and find out what was wrong.

  “Alright, Sarah, enough is enough.” Ronnie dropped the marker onto the table and sat down in the chair next to her. “Out with it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  At first, Ronnie thought the confused look on Sarah’s face was just a show, but he quickly realized it was genuine and she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “What’s bothering you today? You look like you’re in as bad of a mood as I was the other day.”

  “It’s nothing, Ronnie,” Sarah answered, letting out an aggravated sigh, “just the past haunting me again.”

  “Well, like you told me the other day, you’ll feel better if you talk about it.”

  Sarah noticed the determined look on his face, letting her know he wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Alright. Sometimes, I can’t sleep at night. My mind refuses to shut down even though my body screams out how exhausted it is. I think it’s like a by-product from how my life used to be. Until last year, there were plenty of nights I used to lay awake with my nerves on edge and terrified of what might happen in the dark. Last night, I started thinking about how different my life is now than it was last year. Back then, I’d been confused, scared, full of anger, and had felt a destructive force rising up inside of me. But I didn’t know who would be on the receiving end of those negative feelings.” Sarah paused a moment and looked away from Ronnie. When she turned back around, tears were in her eyes. “My greatest fear was I would turn that destructive force on myself.”

  Ronnie remained silent, waiting for her to continue. For the first time since he’d met her, Sarah looked vulnerable and frightened like a little kid who has wandered away from her parents and is now lost, unsure of what to do.

  “Well, last night, I started thinking about Dave. I’m not sure what made me think about him. It could’ve been the stuff going on with your mom, I don’t know.”

  “Who’s Dave?”

  “Dave was my dad.”

  “Do you mean he was your step-dad?” Ronnie asked with a confused look on his face.

  “No, Dave was my real dad.”

  “Then why do you call your real dad Dave?” For a brief second, thoughts about his own father invaded Ronnie’s mind, but he shoved them aside and focused his attention on Sarah again.

  “Remember how I told you someone had done something horrible to me?”

  Ronnie hesitantly nodded his head, preparing himself for what she was about to tell him.

  “Well, Dave was the one who did something horrible to me.”

  Sarah had a distant, emotionless look in her eyes. Ronnie had seen the same steely-eyed look in those old Clint Eastwood movies he used to watch with his grandfather.

  Even though Sarah looked like she was fine, Ronnie cautiously reached over and placed his hand on her shoulder. He hoped his gesture might in some way let her understand he was here for her and, although he wasn’t sure how he knew, he always would be.

  “What happened, Sarah?”

  A couple of days ago, Ronnie wouldn’t have dared ask that question – let alone have this conversation with Sarah. He would’ve felt like he was prying into her life or like she would tell him if she wanted him to know. He’d felt some kind of instant connection with Sarah when he’d first met her, but not strong enough to ask something as direct as this.

  But maybe, Ronnie realized, the strong connection had been there from the very beginning; he just hadn’t recognized it or understood it.

  He noticed Sarah looking at him with a worried look in her eyes, as if she was more concerned about him rather than about telling him what had happened to her.

  “I want to tell you, Ronnie, but I don’t want you to think bad things about me.”

  Ronnie couldn’t imagine anything would make him change his opinion about Sarah. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met, willing to help anyone and constantly embracing life.

  “I would never think bad things about you,” Ronnie reassured her.

  “Okay,” Sarah answered, swallowing a huge lump in her throat. “But promise me you won’t think differently about me.”

  Ronnie raised his right hand. “I swear.”

  “Alright. My parents met right after high school. They dated a couple of months, Mom got pregnant, and they got married. Well, Mom grew up in Smith’s Grove, while Dave was originally from Columbus and still had family there. Once they were married, they decided to move to Columbus because, at the time, there were better jobs up there. And, a few months after they moved, I was born.” Sarah paused a moment as if she was unsure how to continue. “Ronnie,” she finally asked, “what’s your earliest memory?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the earliest thing you can remember from when you were a baby or a real little kid?”

  Ronnie had to think a moment before recalling something.

  “I guess the first thing I can remember is when I was about two or three years old. Mom had this old, green bike, and there was this yellow toddler seat on the back for me to sit in when she went bike riding. We were out riding one day and going across a bridge, on this sidewalk for pedestrians that ran right beside the road. For some reason, Mom lost her balance. The bike fell over, and, when it hit the ground, I was hanging halfway off the sidewalk into the road. This car went by and almost hit me, missing my head by just a few inches. It swerved out of the way at the last second and slammed into the front end of an oncoming car in the next lane. Mom swept me up in her arms and held me so tight I thought she would crush me against her chest. She just kept crying and hugging me.”

  “You must’ve been scared to death.”

  “Yeah, I may have been real little, but I can remember freaking out like crazy. But Mom somehow made it all better even though she was hysterical. By just holding me, she made me feel safer and let me know everything was going to be alright.” Ronnie paused a minute, reliving that moment with his mother when he’d be
en so young. “Why did you want to know about that?”

  “I don’t remember how old I was, but my earliest memory is of Dave touching me – touching me in a place a father shouldn’t touch his daughter. In a lot of ways, it made me feel frightened, just like you felt when you almost got hit by that car. But even more, it made me feel dirty and disgusted, kind of like I’d sat around in a filthy diaper for weeks and it had seeped into my skin so deep I could never feel clean again. And even though I don’t remember how young I was, I couldn’t have been too old because it made me have that dirty-diaper feeling like I did.”

  Ronnie slowly pulled his hand away from Sarah’s shoulder, afraid he was making her feel uncomfortable by touching her. But she stopped him, pushing his hand back down onto her shoulder and then placing her hand on top of his.

  “It’s okay, you’re fine.”

  Ronnie wondered how Sarah could so effortlessly tell what he was thinking. Sometimes, he couldn’t comprehend those thoughts himself, let alone articulate them properly.

  “That was the first time. But there were plenty of other times after that. It didn’t happen every day. I would guess probably three or four times a year at first. But by the time I was ten or eleven years old, Dave was doing it a lot more, maybe two or three times a month. I could never tell Mom what was going on. It’s funny, but I honestly believe he loved Mom and he was good to her. He never hit her or even raised his voice at her. But there was this monster inside of him that made him do those things to me.

  “Well, about a year and a half ago, we moved back to Smith’s Grove. Dave had lost his job and couldn’t find work in Columbus. Mom suggested we come back here and maybe he would have better luck. Once we moved back, they were both able to find work. But after about six months, Dave was laid off from the glass factory. Since Mom still had her job, they decided to stay here until Dave got called back into work.

  “As soon as he got laid off, the things he did to me got worse. He started doing them more because we would be home alone together. But I still couldn’t tell Mom; I wasn’t even sure if she would believe me. So, last October, I heard about the Pumpkin House and how people could volunteer. I asked them if I could help out. The main reason I wanted to do it was because it would get me out of the house and away from Dave during fall break. Mom said it was fine. Dave, of course, said no. But when he couldn’t give a good enough reason why I shouldn’t do it, he had to finally agree to let me volunteer.

  “During the week I helped out here at Mr. Keenan’s, Dave couldn’t do anything to me. That was the happiest time I can remember in my whole life.”

  Sarah paused and closed her eyes, taking in deep breaths as a smile hinted with the corners of her mouth. She looked like she was reliving the feelings of safety and inviolability she had briefly been allowed to experience during her escape from Dave for a whole week last year. Ronnie tried to imagine how the feelings of relief, security, and renewed innocence must have permeated throughout Sarah last October, so foreign and yet so longed-for and gratefully accepted.

  But he couldn’t even begin to put himself in her shoes. He’d never experienced anything in his life that would even compare to the horror she’d endured at the hands of her father.

  “So what happened?” Ronnie finally asked her.

  Sarah opened her eyes and looked at him as if she’d just woken up from a dream.

  “Well, the closer it got to Halloween night, the more worried I got because I knew I wouldn’t have much longer I could get away from Dave by going to the Pumpkin House. And I didn’t know if I could allow him to do those things to me again. I felt like I was suffocating or drowning. I was going to make sure it never happened again.”

  Sarah stopped, as if she was unsure whether or not to continue.

  “Make sure it never happened again how, Sarah?” Ronnie was afraid to hear her answer, but felt like he needed to know.

  “I was either going to kill him or I was going to kill myself.”

  Although Ronnie had felt like he could kill Rick plenty of times for hitting his mother, nothing had ever made him feel like he wanted to kill himself. But then again, he’d never experienced anything remotely similar to what Sarah had undergone and suffered.

  And he could tell she was dead serious by the tone of her voice and the look on her face.

  “What stopped you from doing something to him, or to yourself?”

  “Right when I felt like I was going to lose it from trying to decide what to do once Halloween was over, Dave died.”

  Ronnie noticed how Sarah’s voice didn’t contain the least bit of sadness, and he didn’t blame her in the least. But for a split second, a part of him was afraid Sarah had actually killed her father.

  “Um, Sarah, how did he…you know?”

  “Don’t worry,” Sarah answered, laughing softly, “I didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack. And once he died, I felt like I’d been given a new beginning, like it was my chance for a fresh start or something.”

  Sarah looked down at her flip-flops, the ones with the big, purple stars on them.

  “Do you want to know why I wear these flip-flops all the time, these silly things that look like they belong on some five-year-old little girl? They help me remember that I’m a kid. Sometimes, a kid needs a reminder to be a kid because they lose sight of their innocence, you know?”

  In a way, Ronnie felt guilty. When he’d first seen Sarah’s flip-flops, he’d thought she was weird for wearing them. But now, he could understand why she wore them so much. “Yeah, it makes perfect sense.”

  Ronnie could see tears in Sarah’s eyes, and he could feel tears welling up in his own eyes as well.

  “I’m glad you’re my best friend, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie hadn’t thought of Sarah as his best friend until the moment she’d said the words out loud. He’d always considered Eddie Matthews his best friend. But Ronnie had grown closer to Sarah in the past couple of days than he had ever been with Eddie, even though he’d known Eddie since the first grade. Ronnie reached over and gave her a tight hug.

  “Me too, Sarah,” he whispered into her ear as tears fell down his cheeks, “me too.”

  After a few seconds, Sarah pulled away from him, wiping the tears away from her eyes.

  “Alright, let’s get back to work. If we don’t get anything done today, Mr. Keenan is going to fire us.”

  Ronnie laughed as he handed the list of names to her.

  “Okay, who’s first?”

  * * *

  They worked on the jack-o’-lanterns the rest of the day without taking any breaks. They’d spent almost an hour and a half talking about Sarah’s past and neither one of them wanted to fall behind. Unlike the previous couple of days, the letters of the alphabet flew by. After a few hours, they reached the names starting with the letter L. Sarah was checking the names off the list, and Ronnie had to smile a little when she didn’t try to get back at him for his prank the other day by skipping over his name.

  As Ronnie wrote his own name on the medium-sized jack-o’-lantern, he could’ve sworn a sensation of fear passed through him. For some reason, he was terrified of the possibility of Old Notch-foot coming for his soul on Halloween night if his name was missing from a jack-o’-lantern. The rational part of his brain argued it was absurd to be afraid since Old Notch-foot was just a made-up story Mr. Keenan liked to tell. It gave the old man an excuse for his eccentricities about the Pumpkin House, making them seem more vital because he was protecting the residents of Smith’s Grove from some Halloween demon his grandfather had conjured up one hundred years ago.

  It would make a good book, but just didn’t happen in real life.

  The next name Sarah read off was Stephanie Lancaster, Ronnie’s mother. As Ronnie started to write her name on the bottom of the jack-o’-lantern, his brow wrinkled in a deep furrow of concern and aggravation.

  Sarah noticed the look of exasperation on his face. “How are things going with your mom?”

  Ronnie answered w
ith a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. He finished writing his mother’s name on the pumpkin and took it over to the other finished ones underneath the tent. He dropped it onto the ground and stomped away, leaving it lay on its side.

  Sarah walked over and tenderly set the jack-o’-lantern upright while Ronnie went back over to the table, flinging the Sharpie down. She went and stood in front of him, refusing to budge until he answered her question.

  “You’re the most hard-headed person I’ve ever met,” Ronnie said, smiling and shaking his head. “Fine, I’ll fill you in.”

  The smile on his face evaporated and was quickly replaced by a sour expression as he told her what was going on.

  After a lot of pleading and swearing he was going to change, his mother had taken Rick back, even going so far as to tell Ronnie things would be different this time. But Ronnie had heard it all before and he knew better, even if his mother was too blind to see it. They’d gotten into an argument over Rick. After hearing his mother say how Rick was going to change and quit drinking, Ronnie had blown up at her. He asked her why she kept taking Rick back, telling her they didn’t need him around. His mother gave the usual excuses, saying Rick helped them out and was going to change this time, and how Ronnie just needed to give him a second chance.

  Ronnie was afraid what he might say or do to Rick and felt like this was the calm before the storm.

  “What do you mean?” Sarah asked once he’d finished his story.

  “Sure, Rick is on his best behavior right now because they just got back together. But he’s still drinking, even though Mom said he’d quit. I’m telling you, Sarah, I have a bad feeling something horrible is going to happen to Mom once Rick stops with the ‘good boyfriend’ act and starts behaving like his normal self. It’s been building up for too long.”

  The silence emanated from Sarah. Maybe, because of what she’d gone through last year with her father, she could sense a storm violently approaching as well.

  They remained sitting quietly, neither one of them knowing what to say, for a few more minutes before deciding to finish up for the day. By the time they’d put the final name on the last jack-o’-lantern, they were near the end of the L names, stopping with Roanna Lowery, the sweet and kind librarian at the middle school.