Octavia Boone's Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything Read online

  Unfortunately I have never had this word on a spelling test.

  Dinner was cheese ravioli and green salad with tomatoes and cucumbers and black olives, except not on mine because the word olive reminds me of a rubber ball, which is also what I think black olives taste like. Boone and Ray each had a glass of red wine. The Redeemers don’t believe in drinking coffee or tea, because those aren’t in the Bible, but wine is okay because of the Wedding at Cana and the Last Supper, provided it is taken in moderation.

  Usually I looked forward to those special dinners. We’d all catch each other up about what we were doing, and Boone would make his feeble jokes and we’d laugh, and we’d all sit around together and not just jump up right off to clear the plates. I liked it because I thought that was how family dinners ought to be. I think Boone and Ray did too, even though they’d tease about Mom’s apple pie and Norman Rockwell and the Waltons.

  But that’s not what it was like this time. This dinner didn’t feel right at all. Boone and Ray weren’t eating much, or talking much either, and when they did talk, they said things like “How are you?” and “Fine,” like people who don’t know each other very well but run into each other at bus stops.

  After a while it was so uncomfortable that I was just wishing the meal would be over so that I could go upstairs to my room and get back to Anne of Windy Poplars, which is book four of the Anne of Green Gables series. There are eight books in all, starting with Anne of Green Gables and ending with Rilla of Ingleside.

  Then Boone threw down his chopsticks so that they bounced off the Mexican tablecloth and onto the floor. Boone always ate with chopsticks because he’d read in The Good Life by Scott and Helen Nearing, who were homesteaders in Vermont for about a hundred years and grew all their own food, that they always ate with chopsticks out of wooden bowls. Ray used to tease him all the time about those chopsticks.

  “I don’t get this,” Boone said. “I don’t get this, Rachel. Could you just please explain to me what’s going on all of a sudden with you and this Redeemer thing?”

  “I’m not sure I can,” Ray said.

  “Well, try,” Boone said, sounding impatient and exasperated, like he does when somebody bangs on his shed door when he’s in the middle of creative flow.

  “Stop yelling, Simon,” Ray said.

  “I’m not yelling,” Boone said. “I just really want to understand.”

  I just really wanted to go upstairs.

  “I don’t think I can explain,” Ray said. “It’s something that just happens. You don’t think it through. It comes to you. You feel it.”

  Right off I thought about Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, where the Jedi knight tells Luke Skywalker’s father to just feel, not think. I always thought that was lousy advice. For example, if you’re flying a spaceship and zipping along at about a million miles a minute, you ought to be thinking, not feeling.

  “I’ve always felt sort of empty,” Ray said. “Like nothing really meant anything. You know what I mean, Simon. You’ve said it too. Think how most people live. They run around all the time working at their jobs so they can make enough money to buy a car and a flat-screen TV and maybe take a vacation every once in a while and go to Disneyland.”

  Actually I’d always wanted to go to Disneyland. Andrew’s family went last year, and Andrew said it was really cool except that his little sister Amanda made everybody crazy because she wouldn’t get out of the giant teacups.

  “Is that all there is?” Ray said. “Is that what life’s all about? I was standing in the office parking lot looking at bumper stickers the other day. Just standing there looking at bumper stickers. SHOPAHOLIC. SHOP UNTIL YOU DROP. WHOEVER DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS. And I thought, This is sick.”

  “You mean you think we’ve got too much stuff?” Boone said.

  “I’m not talking about things,” Ray said. “I’m talking about what really matters. I’m talking about how people spend all their time running around on these daily little hamster wheels and then one day they die. There’s no point to it. No real purpose.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by purpose,” Boone said. “I think what it’s all about is finding a person you love, raising kids, doing work you find rewarding, and maybe trying to leave the planet in a little better shape than you found it. That’s purpose enough for me. Isn’t that important?”

  “Of course it’s important,” Ray said. “But there has to be more to it than that. The only way it all makes any sense is if there’s something bigger than us. Better than us. It only makes sense if there’s God. If the purpose of life is to know and serve God. That’s what I believe.”

  “Give me a break, Ray,” Boone said.

  Ray leaned forward.

  “The Redeemers really have answers,” Ray said. “They’re the most honest people I’ve ever known, and the most sincere. Just by being what they are, they’ve helped me believe too. I finally found what I’ve been missing out on, what I’ve been looking for even though I didn’t really know I was looking. It’s a revelation. It’s like the Bible says: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.’”

  She put down her fork, but neatly, on her plate.

  Boone stared at her.

  I thought about looking through a glass darkly. I thought it would be like the black filters Andrew and I once used to look at a solar eclipse. Which you couldn’t look at face to face without burning out your eyeballs.

  I thought suddenly that maybe Ray had looked at the Redeemers face to face and they’d burned out her brain.

  “And I pray all the time that you and Octavia will come to believe too. I’ve never known anything like this before. I love this feeling. I love the person I’m becoming. It’s like everything finally fell into place. It’s wonderful.”

  It didn’t seem so wonderful to me.

  But I also knew that once people start talking about feelings and love, there is no point in trying to reason with them. Infatuated people have lost all sense of proportion. I thought of Andrew and his eight-week one-sided romance with Julie Laroche, during which he was such a brainless puddle of butter that if Julie had had the wit to ask him, he would have signed over his college fund.

  I looked at Ray across the table.

  Don’t feel, I thought. Think.

  “Listen to yourself, Ray,” Boone said. “Just listen to yourself. This isn’t you. This isn’t the person I married. Something’s happened to you. I think you need help.”

  “This is me,” Ray said. “And something has happened to me. That’s what I’ve been telling you, Simon, but you haven’t been listening. I don’t think you’ve been listening all along.”

  Angelique Soulier says that when her parents fight, they scream at each other in French and her mother throws plates, and then everybody cries and hugs and sweeps up the mess and makes up. I suddenly wished that Ray would scream and throw things instead of just sitting there sounding so reasonable and untouchable. I wished most of all that she and Boone would cry and hug and make up.

  “Whatever you’re feeling, Rachel,” Boone said, “I can guarantee it’s not God. I think you need to stop thinking about God and think about your family for a change. And I think most of all that you need to get away from the crazies at that damn motel and go see a psychiatrist.”

  Then he put down his wineglass hard, so that some of the wine slopped out onto the table, and shoved back his chair and got up and walked out of the room. Then we heard the back door slam and when I looked out the window, I could see that the lights had come on in his shed.

  “What if he’s right?” I said.

  “You know nothing about it, Octavia,” Ray said, in her I-am-not-going-to-discuss-this-with-the-child voice.

  I hate that voice.

  “That’s what you think,” I said.

  “That’s enough of that tone, Octavia,” Ray said.

  Being a Redeemer had made Ray cold and reasonable with Boone and critical and snappy with me. Ray had always been gon
e a lot, on account of having a demanding job, but we’d always gotten along just fine. She used to stick funny notes for me on the refrigerator, and instead of signing her name, she would draw this silly little face with hair that stuck up all around like porcupine quills. Sometimes she would leave surprises for me on the kitchen table, like peppermint Life Savers or leopard-print socks or a book she thought I’d like to read. But now everything was changing.

  I think by then the Redeemers had been getting at her about her and Boone’s child-rearing practices. She started quoting this Bible verse all the time: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

  Now practically every word I said, Ray thought it was talking back.

  Here’s another big question.

  What makes a more-or-less normal person with a more-or-less normal life suddenly go off the deep end about God?

  I haven’t much liked cheese ravioli since.

  My O word for that day was Opalling, until I found out that it’s actually spelled with an A.

  ANDREW SAID THAT Ray had snapped.

  He read an article about snapping at the library in an old issue of Psychology Today while he was waiting for his little sister Amanda, who was researching the solar system. Amanda was in third grade. Her class was studying outer space, and for the science fair, she was planning to make a solar system model out of vegetables.

  “It’s like brainwashing,” Andrew said.

  He put a handful of Goldfish crackers in his mouth. As I said, Andrew is always eating something. My theory is that he has the metabolism of a hummingbird, and if he goes for more than ten seconds without food, he’ll die.

  “It’s how cults recruit people. They’re all nice and friendly and they pay you all kinds of attention and they talk at you and talk at you, until suddenly you just snap and then you’re a cult member. You can’t think of anything else. Your brain chemistry changes and everything.”

  Andrew stuck his hands out in front of him and went stalking across the floor like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

  I didn’t think it was funny. I was mad at Ray for causing all this trouble, but I didn’t want her ending up a zombie.

  Andrew ate another handful of Goldfish crackers, thus prolonging his existence for another ten seconds.

  “But you can unbrainwash them,” Andrew said. “Parents do it all the time when it happens to their kids.”

  “How?” I said.

  I was willing.

  “First they kidnap the kids,” Andrew said. “They hire people to steal them away from the cult. Sometimes they raid the cult headquarters in the middle of the night and grab them. Then they take them someplace and lock them up and deprogram them.”

  “How do they do that?” I said.

  “I only skimmed that part,” Andrew said. “Because Amanda was in my face and kept asking if I thought Jupiter should be a cabbage and Saturn a head of iceberg lettuce or the other way around. But it sounded like you just keep asking them logical questions until they realize how screwed up they’ve been, and then they snap back to normal again.”

  I should have known it wasn’t going to be that simple, though, because of what happened at Halloween.

  First I have to say that I love Halloween.

  I even love the word Halloween, which I always see as sort of smooth and stripy, with a hard shiny shell like a pumpkin or an acorn squash. I love going out in the dark when the air has that spicy fall smell and the dead leaves crackle when you walk on them and there are jack-o’-lanterns lit on all the porches. The bare black tree branches look wild and witchy, and on clear nights the sky is thick with stars. We see a lot of stars in Winton Falls because we don’t have much light pollution due to the streetlights being all about a hundred years old and lit with two-watt bulbs.

  Andrew and I always trick-or-treat together. I wear different costumes every year, but Andrew is always a robot, except for our first year together, the year we were in kindergarten, when his mother forced him to be a teddy bear.

  Last year he had a robotic arm that he built with the motor from his old Erector set, that had a retractable claw that he used to pick up his candy. The year before that, he had a backpack made of plastic soda bottles with flashlight bulbs inside so that when he pushed a button, he glowed green. This year he was making an outfit out of paper-towel tubes covered with aluminum foil, with a hidden recording of a mechanical voice that said, “Feed me, Seymour.” That’s a line from the movie Little Shop of Horrors, which is about a giant carnivorous plant from an alien planet.

  I was going as a penguin. I had made my costume from an old white sweatshirt of Ray’s and a black jacket that used to belong to Boone. I had a black baseball cap for my head, and an orange cardboard beak that tied behind my ears and orange cardboard feet. I even had an egg that I’d made with a balloon and instant papier-mâché.

  On the Sunday before Halloween, this is what Mrs. Prescott wrote on the blackboard in my Redeemer classroom:

  There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

  For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

  — DEUTERONOMY 18:10–12

  “What’s that all about?” I asked Marjean, trying to think of what kind of circumstance would make you want to pass your son or daughter through a fire. Maybe if you were escaping from a burning house, in which case it seemed like it should be an “absolutely should” rather than a “shall not.”

  Marjean was wearing a black cardigan sweater and a red calico dress that hung down practically to her ankles. I wondered where her mother got her awful clothes.

  “It’s a warning about Halloween,” Marjean said. “We don’t celebrate it because it’s a glorification of the works of Satan.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. I mean, come on.

  “Last year on Halloween we had a House of Sins here in the church,” Cathy Ann said. “It started in the lobby and went through all the classrooms. Pastor Bruno dressed up as the devil and he had a fan with strips of red cellophane for flames. A lot of the parents did all the different sins. You had to be over ten years old to see some parts of it.”

  “That sounds a lot worse than just plain Halloween,” I said.

  “Well, it wasn’t,” Marjean said. “It was about forswearing the devil and all his works.”

  Margarine, I thought.

  “When Mrs. Prescott comes in, she’s going to ask us all to resist temptation on Halloween,” Marjean said. “She’s going to ask us to promise to come to the prayer meeting here instead.”

  “Well, I’m not going to promise,” I said.

  I wanted to be a penguin.

  “Well, you go right ahead,” Marjean said. “But if you don’t promise, you’ll go to hell.”

  All that must have gotten right back to Ray, because the next thing I knew there was another fight at home.

  “Aren’t you getting too old for Halloween?” Ray said.

  Which was her sideways way of trying to talk me out of it without bringing up the Redeemers.

  “Louanne Pelletier says that Polly hasn’t trick-or-treated for two years now. Neither has Sara Boudreau.”

  I said, “I’ve got my costume all ready.”

  “Oh, come on, Ray,” Boone said. “She’s not too old yet. You’re not too old as long as you’re still having fun.”

  “Maybe that kind of fun isn’t such a good idea,” Ray said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Boone.

  Ray started fooling with her hair, twisting it around her fingers, which she does when she knows there’s about to be an argument.

  “I just mean that maybe we never put enough thought into it,” R
ay said. “About what it all really represents.”

  “So what does it all really represent?” Boone said, sounding ominous.

  “It’s not really wholesome, is it?” Ray said. “Getting all these kids thinking about witchcraft and the Devil.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Boone said, which made Ray sort of wince. “It’s Halloween. It’s not some sinister satanic plot, Ray. It’s just a bunch of kids dressing up and running around in the dark. She’s going to be a penguin, for God’s sake.”

  “You know there’s more to it than that, Simon,” Ray said, tightening up her lips like she does when she’s angry, but trying not to lose her temper.

  “No,” Boone said, getting louder like he does when he’s angry and doesn’t care whether he loses his temper or not. “No, Ray, I don’t know that there’s more to it than that. I don’t believe in witchcraft. What I think is that our daughter is going out with her friend to get some of Clara Peacock’s popcorn balls, of which I hope she gets at least two, so she can bring one home to me. I think what you’re thinking is nuts, Rachel, and I wish to hell you’d snap out of it.”

  Snap back, I thought, and I crossed my fingers.

  But Ray didn’t.

  She and Boone just stood there glaring at each other across the room

  Then Ray said, “Have it your way, Simon. But I’ll be praying for you, Octavia, and you know that I love you, and if you change your mind, you know we want to have you with us.”

  And I got a cold feeling in my stomach.

  Because by us, she didn’t mean her and Boone.

  This pretty much ruined Halloween.

  There are some things that can’t be fixed even by Mrs. Peacock’s popcorn balls.

  ANDREW HAD LOTS OF plans for kidnapping Ray.

  First he thought that we should write a letter, luring her to an isolated spot like the back parking lot of Menard’s Grocery & Liquor Store, and then when she showed up, we’d pounce on her from behind, bundle her into a car, and drive away. Then he thought we could do a commando raid, showing up at her office disguised in ski masks, dropping a blanket over her head, and whisking her off down the back stairs. None of these plans seemed very sensible to me, first because there was a security guard at Ray’s office, and second because neither of us knew how to drive, even though Andrew claimed he did, due to experience with his father’s riding lawn mower.