The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum

The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum is the shared bedroom of Lennie Walker and Bailey Walker, a vividly orange room whose walls, rugs, desk, and pictures preserve the sisters’ everyday life even after Bailey’s death. Lennie’s name for it turns a bedroom into a sanctuary: a place she wants to remain exactly as it was, and where her grief can settle among the things that belonged to Bailey.

Definition and shared history

A few months before the events in which the room becomes a refuge, Bailey persuaded Lennie that their bedroom walls had to be painted a blaring, unapologetic orange. The color is so intense that, in Lennie’s comic description, sunglasses would be optional indoors. Lennie later gives the room its full, newly christened name, The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum. The playful title and startling color make the room feel distinctly theirs: not a neutral bedroom, but a space shaped by the sisters’ shared taste and private language.

Its history is embedded in more than the paint. Three flattened blue rugs lie across the floor, remnants of years of dance competitions in which the sisters tried to out-goofball each other without laughing. Lennie recalls Bailey’s Ferret Face and Monkey Moves as an unbeatable combination, one that could leave Lennie helpless with laughter. The rugs therefore register both as ordinary furnishings and as a physical record of repeated play. Their worn state makes the sisters’ past feel present underfoot, even as the room’s stillness makes Bailey’s absence harder to ignore.

A refuge against change

After Bailey dies, Lennie wants to return upstairs to The Inner Pumpkin Sanctum and keep it as it was. Before leaving for school, she deliberately shuts the door, wishing she could barricade the room against Gram’s cardboard boxes. The boxes make the prospect of sorting and moving Bailey’s belongings immediate; the closed door gives Lennie a temporary boundary against that change. Her wish is not simply to preserve a particular arrangement of objects. It is to keep intact the setting of a life that has abruptly ended.

That wish becomes more painful when Lennie sits at Bailey’s desk and sees open boxes nearby. She cannot bring herself to open the desk drawers. Touching their wooden knobs brings the thought that Bailey will never again search there for a notebook, address, or pen, and Lennie imagines her sister confined in an airless box. She tries to force that image away, but her attention returns to an old drawing of their mother. The bedroom thus holds two absences at once: Bailey’s death and their mother’s long-standing absence, which the sisters had learned about through the story that she was an explorer.

Room, memory, and restraint

The Sanctum also becomes the setting for Lennie’s confused attachment to Toby Shaw. One night, while writing a poem on the wall of Bailey’s closet and trying to contain her panic, Lennie hears a pebble strike the window. She recognizes Toby’s arrival before looking outside. She removes a shirt of Bailey’s, climbs back into the bedroom, crosses the blue rugs, and sees Toby beneath the nearly full moon. When she goes downstairs to let him in, his face is marked by sorrow that resembles her own. The route through the bedroom links the new encounter to the sisters’ remembered space, rather than separating Lennie’s present from Bailey’s life.

Later, on the first day of summer vacation, Lennie sits at Bailey’s desk holding a small statue of St. Anthony, the patron of lost things. She has drawn the curtains and refuses to look toward the plum tree or dwell on the possibility of seeing Toby there. Although classmates are at the river and Sarah urges her to come hear the Fontaine brothers play, Lennie stays in. The room gives her a place to resist an encounter she fears, while its association with Bailey also sharpens her promise that what happened with Toby will not happen again. It is shelter, but not an escape from the choices she is trying to avoid.

A place to address the absent

In a later moment of acute grief, Lennie makes her way upstairs to the Sanctum, which Gram has considered fairly lucky and therefore mostly left untouched. Bailey’s belongings remain in place. Lennie goes directly to the desk and speaks to the old explorer picture as she and Bailey sometimes spoke to the portrait called The Half Mom. She addresses the woman in the drawing as Bailey for the night, apologizes for her thoughts and actions, and asks for a sign of forgiveness. The room’s pictures and possessions do not answer her, but they give her a familiar form through which to express what she cannot resolve alone.

The bedroom’s significance lies in this double function. Its orange walls and flattened dance rugs recall the sisters’ exuberant intimacy; its shut door, untouched drawers, and crowded boxes register Lennie’s fear that grief will turn memory into removal. By returning to the desk and speaking to an image, she does not restore the room to an untouched past or overcome her loss. She uses the space to keep addressing Bailey while beginning, however painfully, to live with the fact that the past cannot remain exactly as it was.