Halloween and Other Seasons

4

Pictures of Jody.

She didn’t know whether to take them down, put them away, turn them to the wall or put them in new frames. Nothing, Emily Wendt knew, would work. If she put them away it would be a defeat, an admission that he was gone, as well as giving up hope.

But having him staring out at her from every room in the house was almost unbearable. She had never realized how many pictures she had of her son: they were everywhere, framed on the hallway wall, in a gilt frame next to her bed, stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, herded with other family portraits on top of the television, on the hunter’s table behind the sofa, the last Sears portrait, from Christmas, on the phone table—

In the end, she put them all away except the one next to her bed.

That had been the first portrait she’d ever had taken of him, when he was one. Jack had still been alive, then. She remembered how much trouble they had keeping Jody still; the photographer had posed him in a chair covered with a blanket and Jody, who had recently taken his first steps, kept trying to dismount the chair. It was obvious he was fascinated by the camera and wanted to study it. Finally the photographer had to let him look it over, click the shutter twice and then promise him another look if he sat still for the picture.

You’d never know he had been any trouble by looking at the finished product. The portrait showed him staring quietly, with big eyes, at the camera; his face held a measure of interest that proved he was only thinking about getting his hands on that machine again. A lick of his thin auburn hair had fallen over his brow (later his hair would thicken, becoming almost coarse; unless cut very short it tended never to stay combed or brushed for long) and his pudgy hands were folded on his lap.

This would be the picture she wouldn’t put away.

Later that day, after the session, she and Jody and Jack had gone to the taco place in the mall, the one and only time they had ever eaten out together. She still remembered what Jody had done to the burrito they had gotten him, how he had dissected it like a frog—

She found herself weeping—the first time, in the week since Jody had been taken, that she had cried. She had thought her life was over after Jack was killed, but now she knew just how much she had still possessed, even after the loss of her husband. There was a hollow place in her now that felt as if it had been scooped out with a trowel, and she knew it would never fill in.

This was nothing like it had been when Jack died.

She collapsed to the floor, hugging Jody’s picture, and sat with her legs folded beneath her, rocking and crying.

“Oh, Jody, Jody…”

She thought she heard him call her name.

She froze in mid sob, and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Jody…?”

She knew how foolish this was, but she had heard him call to her.

Forgetting the picture, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the back of the house. The noise had come from the kitchen.

A blast of cold air hit her. She saw that the kitchen door leading to the backyard was open.

Holding her sweater closed and shivering, she stepped out onto the back stoop.

“Jody?” she called, almost fearfully.

The backyard was awash in unraked leaves pushed into dunes by the wind. The sky was overcast, huge banks of gray cumulus clouds rolling over one another from west to east. The temperature was falling. The pumpkin fields beyond the fence looked ominous, cold, brown and wet. The far hills surrounding Orangefield were dark, the trees stripped of green.

It looked like the landscape of a particular kind of hell.

She shivered, still holding her sweater closed, and turned around.

She gasped, and put her hand to her mouth.

There, staring straight up at her, was the face of a pumpkin. Puffs of steam issued from the eyes, the nose. The surface of the face looked hard and glassy, and, from within, there was a soft orange glow.

There was a body below it, the size of an older boy or young teen, sharp angles and shiny metal. The thing had its hands on her shoulders, holding her. There were gloves on its hands, but she could feel sharp metal fingers within.

The face came closer. There was a flat metallic smell, like 3-in-1 oil. The eyes stared into her, studying her, as if watching her from a far distance.

A long puff of metallic-smelling steam hissed forth from the mouth, which was smiling impossibly wide through its two angled teeth.

The jet of steam held a word, in the form of a question:

“Mmmmmom?” Jody said.