Lazarus replied, “She may stay with us as long as she wishes.”
* * *
? ? ?
THE HOUSE WAS clay-baked with tiled floors, dyed woolen mats, and its own mikvah, an abode far better than our house in Nazareth, but there was only one room for guests and that night Jesus slept on the roof, while I made my bed beside Tabitha.
While she slept, I lay in the dark and listened to her breath, a croaking sound that erupted at times into puffs and moans. Her small, lissome body, the one that had danced with such grace and abandon, was bony and clenched as if in a perpetual state of recoil. I could see the protuberances of her cheekbones like sharp little hills on her face. Mary had bathed her and dressed her in a clean tunic and covered her wound with a plaster of olive oil and onion to draw the pus. The sour smell of it hung over the room. I longed to speak to her. She’d wakened earlier, but only long enough to drink a full cup of lemon water.
I thought of Lazarus’s words. Until he’d spoken them, I’d not considered where Tabitha would go. What would become of her? If I had my way, I’d take her to live with us in Nazareth, but even if the entire family welcomed her, which was unlikely given that Judith was Judith and James was James, there was little room left in our cramped compound. Already Yaltha slept in the storeroom. Simon was betrothed to a girl named Berenice, who would soon join the household, and it seemed likely Salome might return any day as a widow.
When Tabitha stirred on the mat, I lit the lamp and stroked her cheek. “I’m here. It’s Ana.”
“I ’ough I ’ream you.”
What is she saying? What was left of her tongue could provide only the bare rudiments of a word—I would have to guess at the rest. As she repeated herself, I concentrated. “You thought you dreamed me?”
She nodded, smiling a little, not taking her eyes from me. How long, I thought, has it been since she was listened to, much less understood?
“My husband and I found you on the Jericho road.”
She touched her bandage, then gazed about the room.
“You’re in Bethany, in the house of my husband’s closest friends,” I told her, and realized suddenly she would think my husband was Nathaniel. “I was wed two years ago, not to Nathaniel, but to a stonemason and carpenter from Nazareth.” Her eyes brightened with curiosity—the twitch of her old self still inside there—but her lids were weighted with fatigue and the chamomile Mary had put in her lemon water. “Sleep now,” I told her. “I’ll tell you more later.”
I dipped my finger in the bowl of olive oil Mary had left and touched it to her forehead. “I anoint you, Tabitha, friend of Ana,” I whispered, and watched the memory float into her face.
x.
In the days leading up to Passover, the wound on Tabitha’s head formed a healing scab. Strength seeped into her limbs. She left her bed and ventured into the courtyard to take meals with the rest of us, eating ravenously, at times laboring to swallow. Her face started to lose its hills and valleys.
I scarcely left my friend’s side. When we were alone, I filled the silence with stories of what had transpired since we’d parted . . . burying my scrolls, meeting Jesus at the cave, Nathaniel’s death, befriending Phasaelis, Herod Antipas and the mosaic. She listened with parted lips, offering up little grunts, and when I described the scheme to make me Antipas’s concubine and how close I came to being stoned, she let out a cry, took my hand, and kissed each knuckle in turn. “I’m scorned in Sepphoris and Nazareth both,” I said. I wanted her to know she was not alone—I was a mamzer, too.
She prodded me to speak of Jesus, and I related the strange way I had come to marry him and the sort of man he was. I told her about the compound in Nazareth, about Yaltha, Judith, my mother-in-law. I talked and talked, but always pausing to say, “Now, tell me, what