The Challenge Box

by Isobel Bird

  Their oysters came, interrupting the moment. Juliet placed the framed photo on the table, where they could see it, and she and Annie each took an oyster. Clicking the shells together in a kind of toast to one another, they tipped the oysters into their mouths and swallowed.

  “Those are fantastic,” Annie said after she’d downed her oyster. “I am never going to forget this place. It’s just amazing.”

  “Well, it will be our secret place,” Juliet said. “Whenever you come back, we’ll come here.”

  Come back. Annie heard the words, and they filled her with happiness. Juliet wanted her to come back. Annie wanted to do that more than anything. Then the dark thoughts she’d been having all afternoon cut across her joy like sudden rain, the thoughts about giving up Juliet. She still didn’t know what that meant, and it was making her crazy. She had to figure it out.

  I wish I could talk to her about Wicca, Annie thought. I wish I could explain what’s going on with me. But I don’t want her to think I’m crazy. Not until she knows me better.

  That’s when it hit her. The whole trip, she’d been avoiding telling Juliet about her interest in Wicca. Several times Juliet had asked how Annie had thought to look up the Northern Star adoption search service that had brought them together. Annie had told her that it had been totally coincidental, not mentioning the fact that it had really been because they’d been studying astrology in their weekly class and that an astrological reading had indicated Juliet’s existence. She was afraid that would sound too weird for Juliet, and she didn’t want to risk alienating her sister now that they’d found one another. If that meant hiding her involvement in witchcraft for a while, it seemed a small price to pay.

  But now she realized that in hiding her interest in Wicca, she’d actually been paying an even bigger price. She’d been hiding a huge part of her life from Juliet, a huge part of who she was as a person. It had seemed like no big deal at first. Now Annie realized that it was a very big deal. She needed to tell Juliet about herself. She needed to talk about Wicca, and about how it had brought them together. And she knew that it might totally freak Juliet out. She’d seen that happen with people. Look at Kate’s parents, she thought, thinking about how angry the Morgans had been at finding out about Kate’s involvement in the Craft. Look at Cooper’s mother, and Brian, she continued, remembering how the supposedly great guy she’d been dating had dumped her after she’d written an editorial for the school newspaper about being into Wicca. Then there were the guys who had attacked them on the street because Cooper was wearing a pentacle, and the police sergeant who had originally thought they were all nuts when they’d offered to help find a missing girl after having visions of her. All of these people had reacted badly. What if Juliet was one of them?

  Annie took another oyster, but she barely tasted it as she ate it. You have to risk losing her, she thought with incredible sadness. You have to risk giving away this relationship with her. That’s your challenge. Her choice was very clear to her. She had to tell Juliet, and she had to risk that in doing so she would indeed be giving up her most precious possession. It didn’t seem fair, but in her heart Annie knew that it was. Part of being a witch—a real witch—involved taking risks. It also involved being honest, particularly with the people you were closest to. Annie knew she could never be totally free to practice magic and walk the Wiccan path as long as she had to worry that Juliet would find out about her. She’d seen Kate learn that lesson in a very painful way, and she’d seen Cooper do it as well. But she had always been lucky. Her aunt fully supported her. Apart from Brian, no one in her life had ever turned away from her because she was involved in witchcraft. And Brian was just some guy, she thought. Juliet is your sister. She knew that if Juliet reacted badly to hearing that her little sister was planning on becoming a witch, it would change everything. Annie would be forced to choose. And the real problem was that at that moment she wasn’t sure what she would choose. Wicca meant so much to her life, but now so did Juliet. If being a witch meant not having her sister in her life, would Annie stop practicing Wicca?

  There’s only one way to find out, Annie thought. It was time to meet her challenge. She looked at Juliet, who had just finished eating another oyster and was wiping her mouth. Her sister had a funny expression on her face, and Annie smiled watching her. She loved Juliet, and she loved being with her. She looked around at the lights in the trees, and at the city beyond the gate of the restaurant. She loved New Orleans as well, and would love to visit the city again. Then she glanced down at the picture of her parents holding Juliet. Was she about to give her sister up, the way they had? Like them, she had to make a decision. If she told Juliet about herself, she might lose her. If she didn’t tell her, she would fail her challenge. Neither option was at all comforting, and she didn’t want to put herself in the position of having to risk one or the other. But she did have to. She knew that without any doubt. She had to do it because she owed it to herself to be honest with Juliet, and she had to do it because everything she’d learned in her study of witchcraft told her that being true to herself was of utmost importance.

  She thought about the voodoo dancers she’d seen on Mardi Gras. They were giving up their possessions to the fire. Was she about to throw her relationship with Juliet—so new and so precious—into the flames? Was it what she really had to give up in order to be worthy of initiation? She pictured the dark eyes of the girl in white. Go on, they seemed to say. Step up to the fire. Mam’zelle will look after you. After all, you paid your pennies. Then the girl laughed, a laugh that seemed to take away some of Annie’s fears, if not all of them.

  She closed her eyes. Here I go, she thought. Then she opened them and looked across the table at her sister. “Um, there’s something I need to talk to you about,” she began.

  CHAPTER 15

  Kate walked down the aisle and took a seat in a pew about halfway back from the front of the sanctuary. It was Friday afternoon. The rain had begun again, and outside the weather was wild. Anyone with any sense was indoors. Kate was glad of this. It meant that she had the place to herself. She had walked through the wind and rain to come to St. Mary’s to think, and she wanted to do that in private.

  Upon coming in she had stopped at the back of the sanctuary to light a candle. There was a table of candles there, and if people wanted to they could light one and say a prayer or just light a candle to represent the memory of a loved one. Kate had always enjoyed coming in and seeing the rows of candles flickering. To her the burning flames represented the hopes and desires of people who, even though she didn’t know who they were, wanted to make some kind of changes in their lives.

  She had added her wish to theirs, lighting a candle and asking for guidance in facing the challenge she was hoping to meet there that afternoon. Then she had taken her place in the pew. She sat there now, just being quiet and waiting. Waiting for what, she wasn’t sure. But she knew that the sanctuary of the church was where she needed to be, because it represented her challenge to her. Behind her lay the traditions of her past, everything she was familiar with and knew. Ahead of her lay the Wiccan path. Some of what awaited her along that path she was familiar with already, but there was still a lot she didn’t know, a lot she was unsure of. If she went forward with initiation, she knew that a lot of the things from her past would in some way be gone. Not everything, but some important things. She would be striking out in a new direction, while her family remained behind.

  She knew, too, that this was a challenge her friends were not facing. Neither Annie nor Cooper had been brought up in a particularly religious family. Annie’s aunt had encouraged her niece to explore whatever interested her spiritually, and while Cooper’s family occasionally went to church, their involvement in it was largely confined to attending services on holidays. Although both Annie and Cooper had faced challenges of their own related to practicing Wicca, Kate was alone in her particular situation.

  Her family was religious. More than that, they saw religion as
making up a significant part of their identity. Now Kate was challenging that identity by being involved in a spiritual tradition they didn’t really understand and that they accepted only unwillingly. Her mother had come the farthest in attempting to understand what Kate found so compelling about Wicca, primarily because Kate had unwittingly dragged her family into the world of the Craft when she’d arranged a healing circle for her Aunt Netty. Mrs. Morgan had been extremely resistant to even talking about witchcraft at that point, but in the months since her sister’s remarkable recovery from cancer, she had made tentative inquiries about what it was Kate and her friends did. Aunt Netty, who herself had become much more interested in Wicca as a result of her experiences, joked that Kate’s mother was like a little kid who was dipping her toe into water she secretly longed to dive headfirst into but who was prevented from doing so by her fear of things lying in wait below the surface.

  Kate knew her mother would never become Wiccan. She might be intrigued by it, but she was too attached to her way of seeing the world to let go of it. And that was okay. Something Kate had learned was that there was no one way of believing, no one way of seeing the world and your place in it. The path her mother chose was her path and no one else’s, just as Kate’s path was hers alone to walk.

  But knowing that didn’t make her choice any easier. Just because you could choose something didn’t mean that you had to, or even that you should. Whether or not it was okay for her to want to be a witch wasn’t the question; the question was whether or not she should be one. Was it really the path that was going to take her to the places where she wanted and needed to go?

  She looked around the sanctuary. She loved the way St. Mary’s looked. It was an old church, made of stone, and Kate had spent numerous Sunday mornings sitting in a pew and trying to count the number of stones that made up the walls and the arches. She never got very far before she couldn’t tell one stone from another, so she’d never been able to get anything like an accurate count, but still it was fun.

  Her gaze moved over the tall candlesticks that flanked the altar where Father Mahoney blessed the wine and the bread for Communion, and over the large organ situated to one side of the sanctuary. She pictured Mrs. Bingen sitting at it, her hands and feet flying over the keys and the pedals as she played. She imagined the choir singing, filling the sanctuary with their voices.

  Then her eyes moved up to the stained-glass windows. Just as she’d often counted the stones in the walls, she had also spent many hours staring at the windows. Each one featured a picture of another saint or religious figure, their faces looking down with curious expressions, as if they were trying to figure out why everyone had come to see them. There was St. Michael the Archangel, with glorious wings sprouting from his back and a spear in his hand. There were the saints Peter and Paul, side by side and all done in shades of green and red.

  Before she found out that they were saints and other religious figures, before she knew their real names and their real life stories, Kate had made up stories about the figures in the windows. Her favorite was a window depicting the Virgin Mary. Before realizing that it was the Mary, the one the church was named after, Kate had simply called her the Blue Lady because her robes were done in different shades of blue glass. Kate had made up numerous stories about the Blue Lady, and in every one of them the Lady knew exactly what to do to make everything come out all right.

  Kate looked at the image of Mary. Because of the rain, her colors were dulled and she looked tired. Yet on her face she still wore the familiar smile Kate had always found comforting. She remembered the first time she had really understood the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Thinking about it, she had tried to imagine what it must have been like for Mary, a young girl, to be told by an angel that she was carrying the child of God. I would have been so freaked, she thought, attempting to put herself in Mary’s place. She knew that if some creature ever appeared to her and told her any such thing she would probably run screaming.

  Then again, she thought, if anyone had told me I would be talking to African spirits, helping out dead girls, and preparing to become a witch I would probably have done the same thing. At least she would have a year ago. But now she had done all those things, was preparing to do the last of them. How had she come to be in the place she was in?

  You got here because you believed, a voice in her mind said gently. You allowed yourself to believe that it was possible.

  Kate hadn’t always believed that magic was real or that Wicca was genuine. At the beginning she had thought it was all a lot of nonsense. Interesting nonsense, but nonsense just the same. When her first spell had worked—albeit not in exactly the way she had planned—she had started to change her mind. And as time had gone on and she’d allowed herself to take tiny steps forward along the path, she’d become more and more convinced of the reality of witchcraft. Now she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever doubted its existence. Time and again she’d seen the power of Wicca in action.

  She herself was the strongest argument for its powers. A year ago she had been primarily concerned with how popular she was or wasn’t, and with which guy would ask her to the Valentine’s Day dance. She’d been overly worried about her reputation and with how people saw her. Now, after experiencing so many different things—both with her friends and alone—she was someone different. She was stronger and more confident. She knew more about who she really was, and about what she was capable of. She’d faced a lot of things and come through changed.

  Maybe that’s enough, she told herself. Maybe that’s all you really needed to do. Maybe you don’t need initiation. It was a good argument, and a comforting one. But she knew she didn’t believe it. Sure, she could stop there and just be happy with what she’d learned. She could never do another magic circle or a spell, at least not as an initiated witch, and she could make her family happy.

  But she wouldn’t be happy. She would be doing exactly what she’d done when she’d allowed her worries about how other people perceived her to affect her decisions. Never again, she knew, would she do that. She was too strong, too determined, to let that happen.

  No, the real obstacle facing her was whether or not she believed in Wicca strongly enough to embrace it fully by going through with initiation. Did she really want to declare herself a witch? Did she want to take on the responsibility of publicly choosing to walk the Wiccan path for the rest of her life?

  She looked up at Mary again. How did you know? she asked the image. How did you know what you really believed?

  Mary simply looked back at her with the same small smile, not answering. Not that Kate had expected her to. She sighed and leaned back in the pew. How did she know what she believed? In Sunday school they had been taught a lot about what was and was not true. Kate had never questioned it. Why would I? she thought. But now she found that questions were all she had. Did she really believe in the Goddess? Did she believe in magic, and in committing herself to discovering the magic within her on a daily basis? How did she know these things were real?

  She stretched her leg, and her foot hit the backpack she’d carried with her. Inside it was the book Father Mahoney had loaned to her, as well as the final gift from Cooper’s box. The book she had brought to return to the priest. She had finished reading it, and she’d enjoyed it. In particular she’d liked the way Thomas Merton had described feeling restless and confused as a young man. While she could never imagine herself finding the answers to her questions in a monastery, the way Merton had, she understood his desire to connect with something he could believe in.

  But how does anyone really believe anything? she asked herself. There are so many choices. God exists. God doesn’t exist. The Goddess exists. The Goddess doesn’t exist. It matters. It doesn’t matter. There’s a heaven and hell. There’s no heaven or hell. Religions were supposed to answer these questions, weren’t they? And didn’t they, in their own unique ways? Isn’t that why so often people with different views on religion came into conflict with one a
nother? Isn’t it why she herself was having so much trouble deciding what to do, because she was unsure what she should believe?

  She wasn’t coming up with any answers. To distract herself she decided to open Cooper’s gift. She opened her backpack and took it out, holding it in her hands. It was a box, about five inches square. When she shook it she heard something inside moving around. But she couldn’t imagine what it was.

  She pulled off the paper and laughed. Inside was a Magic 8 Ball. She’d had one when she was a kid, but hadn’t seen one in a while. It was a big plastic ball filled with bluish water, painted to look like the 8 ball from a billiard set. There was a round plastic window set into it, and when it was shaken a triangular die with phrases printed on all its sides appeared in the window, giving an answer to whatever question you asked the Magic 8 Ball. The answers were things like “no,” “maybe,” “definitely yes,” and “ask again.” It had been a favorite toy of Kate’s, and she thought it was funny that Cooper had thought to give her one.

  She looked at the Magic 8 Ball in her hands, thinking. You might as well, she told herself. Then, feeling incredibly foolish, she held the toy in her palms and said softly, “Should I become a witch?”

  She shook the Magic 8 Ball for a few moments and then held it up. The triangular die appeared in the window, floating up from the ball’s murky depths. “Maybe,” Kate read. “That’s a lot of help.”

  She decided to try again. This time she asked, “Is the Goddess real?”

  Again she shook the Magic 8 Ball, and again when she looked she saw “maybe” staring back at her.