Lavi said, “Do you need to rest?” We’d been walking since daybreak.
“My husband and my brother are just beyond this valley,” I said. “I will rest once I see them.”
We walked the last stretch to Bethany in silence. Had I not been so weary, my feet might’ve broken into a run.
“The lamps in the courtyard are still burning,” Lavi said as we reached the house of Jesus’s friends, and now, my friends, too. He pounded on the gate, calling out that Ana, wife of Jesus, had arrived.
I expected to see Jesus hurrying to let us in, but Lazarus came. He looked well, not nearly so yellow and pallid as when I’d seen him before. He greeted me with a kiss. “Come, both of you.”
“Where is Jesus?” I said.
His feet slowed, but he walked on into the courtyard, as if he hadn’t heard. “Mary, Martha,” he called. “Look who’s here.”
The sisters rushed from the house, throwing their arms open. They seemed shorter, their faces rounder. They greeted Lavi with the same warmth they’d once bestowed on Tabitha. Thinking of her, I looked about, but she, too, was nowhere to be seen. I did notice a stack of sleeping mats piled beside the outer wall. Folded on top of them was a worn flaxen cloak.
“You and Lavi must be famished,” Martha said. “I’ll bring what’s left of the Passover meal.”
As she hurried off, I went and picked up the cloak. It bore my poor, uneven weaving. I held the garment to my face—it was filled with his scent. “This belongs to Jesus,” I said to Mary.
She smiled in that serene way of hers. “It’s his, yes.”
“And this as well,” said Lavi, holding up a staff made of olive wood, the one Jesus had carved while sitting beneath the tree in the compound in Nazareth.
I took it, wrapping my fingers around the wood, feeling the smooth, polished place his hand had worn.
“Jesus and his disciples have been staying with us for some time,” Mary said, nodding at the mound of bed mats. “They spend their days in the city and return in the evening to sleep in the courtyard. This past week, each time Jesus came through the gate, he would ask, ‘Has Ana come?’ You seemed very much on his mind.” She smiled at me. I bit hard into my lip.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He observed Passover in Jerusalem with his disciples.”
“Not here with you?”
“We expected them to share the meal with us, but Jesus changed his mind only this morning, saying he would take Passover alone with his disciples in the city. I admit, it did not please Martha. She’d prepared enough for the lot of them, and I can attest they eat a great deal.” She laughed, and it came out all wrong, high-pitched and uneasy.
“Was Judas among them?”
“Your brother? Yes. He hardly left Jesus’s side, except. . . .”
I waited, but she did not continue. “Except?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just that yesterday when Jesus and the others returned from the city, Judas was not with them. I heard Jesus ask Peter and John if they knew his whereabouts. It was quite late when he finally appeared, and even then he kept to himself. He ate alone over there in the corner.” She pointed across the courtyard. “I thought he didn’t feel well.”
I doubted this odd behavior of Judas’s was nothing, as she’d suggested, though I couldn’t have said what it meant. I was still clutching Jesus’s staff and his cloak, gripping them so tightly I became aware of an ache in my fingers. Relinquishing the items onto a bench, I walked to the gap in the courtyard wall and looked west toward Jerusalem. “Shouldn’t Jesus have returned by now?”
Mary came and stood beside me. “It’s his custom to pray on the Mount of Olives each evening, but even so, he’s long overdue.” Her face was shadowed, but I saw something there, something more than dismay at his lateness. I saw dread.
“Ana?” The voice came from across the courtyard, one I’d not heard